


Crossing the Line

by Minette



Series: The Line [2]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: A bit of masturbation, A lot of hitting, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Assault, BDSM, Canonical Character Death, Consensual Violence, Consent, Consent Issues, Dom/sub Play, Dubiously Consensual Violence, Gen, Id Fic, Impact Play, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, No Romance, No Sex, Non-Consensual Violence, Okay actually there's canon romance in the last 2 chapters, Sadomasochism, Season/Series 05, Season/Series 06, Season/Series 07, platonic kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-05-07 09:14:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 41,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14667954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minette/pseuds/Minette
Summary: Sometimes the day just ends. And sometimes it drags on while you lie on your own carpet, in agony, bleeding out, at the mercy of a narcissistic sociopath with a knife and a grudge.Hotch was just coming to terms with his broken marriage, and getting his head around this arrangement where Reid makes him hit him. Okay, so he's drinking a bit much, but he's going to start cutting back on that any day now. Point is, he's doing better than he has in a long time. And then Foyet turns up in his apartment, and everything goes to hell.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> <reappears from the ether two years later>
> 
> Haha, I did warn you I was slow and easily distractible. But behold, I have finished the second part of this trilogy! Again, all 22 chapters are completed and comprise a fairly standalone story arc (though of course for those just joining us, reading the first part in the series is highly recommended). I'm now taking suggestions on how frequently I should post the chapters. One a day? One a week? At one a month, by the time I post the last one I _might_ have finished the third part of the trilogy... but let's be realistic, probably not.

Usually it's Reid who's whimpering in pain on the floor of Hotch's apartment.

Hotch thinks all the whimpering is in his head. Dad taught him that lesson well: _You want me to give you something worth whining about?_ It's just all the more urgent now, with Foyet kneeling over him, shoving the knife again between his ribs.

His throat locks on something that wants to be a scream. He whites out.

Comes to with a bloody knife blurring in his vision. Vaguely he thinks: when Morgan passed out, Foyet left him alive. But no-one's chasing Foyet now. Hotch won't get off that easily.

Thinks: Foyet wants to dominate. Hotch can't cede an inch. He has to strike back, even if all he has is words. Weak as he is, prove he still considers himself Foyet's match. He summons all his energy to speak firmly. "I _will_ kill you..."

It comes out as a breath he can barely hear over the roaring in his ears. Now he knows he's not whimpering. It'd hurt too much to whimper.

"Don't speak," Foyet soothes, and he lies there not speaking.

He tells himself he's listening for clues. Waiting for the moment Foyet lets down his guard. He'll only have one chance—

Then Foyet stabs him again. With the coursing pain comes the knowledge: he's already had his one chance. His one chance was the whiskey glass, which Foyet saw coming and blocked with his mask. He had his one chance and threw it away.

Foyet leaves the knife on his stomach, hot and heavy, as he sits back to strip off his gloves and jacket. Right there on his stomach, and Hotch can no more reach it than his gun across the room. He can barely twitch a finger. All he can hope for is to draw this out until—

Until what? Not until Reid visits at ten in the morning. Ten hours is a lifetime. Maybe if he'd let him visit tonight — but Reid leaves his phone in the car. He certainly doesn't come armed. He'd be no better off than any concerned neighbour.

(Another reason not to scream, back when he could have. A midnight gunshot in a good area might be a car backfiring, but screams would bring a knock on the door, another victim for Foyet's knife.)

Bare-chested, Foyet kneels over him again. Through the haze, Hotch can't see the scars he's showing off. Only the spot on his chest where Hotch would plunge the knife, if he had it in his hand. If he could sit up. If he had ham he could have a ham sandwich, if he had bread.

The fact is he's going to die here.

It makes things simpler. No more conserving his energy. Just rattle Foyet into making a mistake the BAU can use. He pulls the words together again — manages a dizzying, "My team..."

"Your team," Foyet snarls back. "Your team didn't catch me until I wanted them to."

His anger belies him. Hotch tries to feel triumph. Tries to think what to say next. But it's all slipping away. He's halfway across the line to that other lucidity, like when Reid tells him to stop, and to go, and—

"You're not in charge."

And Hotch knows he's right. It's so much easier when he relaxes.

*

When he wakes in the hospital he tells Prentiss he doesn't remember anything. He tells Haley he's fine. He tells Jack he'll see him soon.

All lies.

When they're gone, it's Dave's turn at the comforting lie. Apparently the team were called to another case this morning. They worked the profile, it had a happy ending. It's the same message he gave Hotch after the bus massacre in Boston, minus the dramatics: Hotch might be down for the count, but the team will carry on. And they'll catch Foyet.

What little comfort he took from it then eludes him completely now. He says so. Dave insists. He almost lets himself believe it just to save the effort of arguing. But _happy ending_ echoes sourly in his head. "You left something out of that story," he says.

Dave's got a hell of a poker face. "What's that?" he asks.

"You, Morgan, Prentiss, JJ — you were all here when I woke up. Reid hasn't been here once. He doesn't have a problem with hospitals, so where is he?"

"Aw, you know the kid," Dave says with awkward levity. "He jumped in front of a bullet, it went right through his knee. He's going to be on crutches for a few weeks, but he'll be fine."

Hotch snorts. (Somewhere distant, muffled by industrial grade painkillers, it jags at one of the holes in his chest.) He looks back up at the light on the ceiling. "Dave," he tells it, "I am going to do everything in my power to keep Foyet from winning this. But don't give me that 'happy ending' bull pucky."

*

Garcia brings tinsel and fake flowers, and Jack's handprints and photo from his office, and a bottle of orange juice with a message from Reid: _Get well soon_.

He stares for a long time at the photo, trying to erase his memory of the blood-smeared one Foyet left tucked into his credentials. Stares at the beaming smile, trying to erase his memory of Jack sitting on his hospital bed to say goodbye, so somber Hotch barely recognised him.

He dimly wishes Reid had sent a bottle of whiskey instead of juice.

But there are two ways of reading _Get well soon_. One is a wish; the other is an order. If he's going to keep Foyet from winning—

(Damn Tom Shaunessy anyway. If you _must_ make a deal with the devil "til death do us part" then at least have the decency not to drink yourself to that early death.)

—he needs his head clear. No more trying to wean himself off it and failing miserably. It stops now.

(But he's decided that before.)

When Dr Zwerling next passes through, before he can chicken out, he tells her, "So I'd rather this stay out of my medical file, but you should probably know I've been trying to quit drinking and not doing a very good job of it."

Thankfully she just rolls with it. "When was your last drink?"

He tries not to picture the scene, but there's probably a reason her eyes flick to the heartrate monitor and back. "A sip just before Foyet attacked. Before that it would have been about forty-eight hours. Four or... probably five standard drinks."

The mental note she makes looks from the outside very much like a six, which may not be so wrong. She asks a few more brisk questions about quantity and frequency and hangover severity, and doesn't look entirely convinced when he says he doesn't drink in the morning, or on a case.

"My team would notice," he explains.

"Okay," she says provisionally. She picks up his chart, but only to leaf through it. "Some of your injuries are very close to the liver so it won't look unusual if I order some more tests there. Best hold off on that juice until we get some vitamins in your IV." With this she returns to noting down the numbers off his monitor.

After a silent moment he ventures, "The reason I've... been concerned is that my father died of a heart attack when he tried to go cold turkey."

She meets his eyes assessingly. "You should be past the worst risk for that by now, and the lorazepam you're on for the seizures will help too. But yes. If you keep binging, that will happen." As he opens his mouth to object to the term, she puts in, "And your team will notice."

The idea of withdrawal symptoms on a case — or while he's trying to track down Foyet... "Consider me suitably scared."

It comes out sounding a lot more flippant than he meant it, but once more her glance goes to the heartrate monitor. Goddamned polygraph, he thinks, without energy to really care. She puts the chart back at the end of his bed and says, "I've been warned you'll try and discharge yourself early." (Goddamned Dave.) "If you do that, I can't taper your meds properly and it'll be ten times harder to stay dry when you leave. So, just how scared are you?"

He's trapped on his back while the love of his life and their not yet four-year-old son head into witness protection to escape a sadistic predator who's just given Hotch an excruciatingly graphic demonstration of what he'll do—

He catches his breath in the part of his throat where everything tastes of steel, and lets it slowly out through his teeth. Like he told Dave: everything in his power to keep Foyet from winning this. Which means (however Reid meant it) getting well soon. "I'll follow doctor's orders," he says faintly, and in desperate exhaustion submits without cavil even to her order of sedatives to let him sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

Every time he has a decision to make he starts with _Will this keep Foyet from winning?_

Foyet is a narcissist who needs his story to be told, so when the press gets wind of it he has JJ give them whatever it takes to make sure they print "an unidentified assailant". The only photo that runs is Hotch's.

Foyet needs to be the centre of attention, so Hotch tells Dave to keep the team flying out to work in the field. The more visibly they can be preoccupied with some other, more urgent serial killer, the better.

Hotch needs to get back to full health, so he stays in the hospital until Dr Zwerling discharges him herself. But he needs to stay on top of the case, so he threatens Dave that he _will_ leave if he doesn't get copies of the files.

(Foyet's childhood in Michigan is a familiar story: abusive father, negligent mother. Hotch has no sympathy.)

JJ's offered to find him a new apartment, but he's not giving Foyet the satisfaction of chasing him out of his own home. Dave's offered to drive him, but he's not resorting to a bodyguard either. When he's finally discharged he takes a taxi instead.

He lets himself in, and is greeted by beeps. Someone's had an alarm system wired into the bullet-hole above the whiskey glasses.

(He breathes through the memory of washing Elle's blood off her lounge wall and doesn't let free association take him any further.)

The alarm's still beeping. There's a sticky note on the control panel, in Dave's writing: _Hardwicke's interview_. He pulls the note off, and taps the date in — not quick enough to stop it blaring full blast halfway through, but the last two digits cut it off. A moment later his phone rings: Dave himself.

"You couldn't have warned me?" Hotch asks.

"Sure, if you'd called me for a lift home like I told you to."

He rolls his eyes and picks up the whiskey bottle. "Don't you have a dayjob of some sort?"

"Be like that, then." There's a reason he left the sticky note too. "Instructions are in the top drawer."

He pours the rest of the whiskey down the sink. The empty bottle goes back where it was, the better to forestall questions from Dave when he brings (because he will bring) groceries. The full one in the kitchen cupboard goes to the landlord for putting up with what he imagines was a lot of crimescene investigators, and presumably also a lot of Dave. Getting rid of the alcohol is a small victory.

The next day is harder. The next day harder still. The day after that he at least gets to go in for a checkup. The days and the days and the days after that he gets through by sleeping a lot, obsessively reading the case files when he's awake, and reminding himself that another day of torture is another day Foyet doesn't win.

But when every decision he makes is based on thwarting Foyet, isn't Foyet controlling him just the same? And Foyet knows it. _Is this part of my profile: you can't show me fear?_

(He also transcribes his memory of everything Foyet said to him while he lay bleeding there on the floor. There are the clues he missed at the time that Foyet always planned to let him (make him) live, but nothing that will help the case. He burns his notes at the gas range and washes the ashes down the sink.)

He can't second-guess himself. This _is_ the profile.

So he follows doctor's orders to the letter. He gets well. He's cleared to return to work without even having to beg, con, or bully anyone. Unless you count the psych eval, but if he can fake it for the psychologist he can fake it in the field. Going back the same day as Reid is another way of letting Foyet know, if he's watching (and he will be), that Hotch isn't letting him win.

(Besides, one more day stuck in this claustrophobic box and he _will_ be crawling out of his own skull.)

*

He lets Prentiss pick him up on Wednesday morning because she had the unenviable experience of being first on the scene thirty-four days ago. (And because she's a woman so Foyet won't see her as a protector.) He ignores Morgan's wariness around him: Morgan was wary when Gideon returned too. (And look how that turned out, two years later.) He gets on with the case.

...And snaps at a witness and at Garcia, and isn't sure how hard he tried to stop the UnSub shooting his own father, and comes home so exhausted he's all but crying on Prentiss's shoulder.

At least Thursday is solid paperwork, with no reason to leave his desk except to fill his coffee mug. He keeps an eye on Reid through his office window (is aware of Prentiss and Morgan keeping an eye on him in return) but though Reid's more restive than usual, trying to find a comfortable position for his knee, he seems to be holding up at least as well as Hotch. He even fetches his own coffee (in a thermos in his satchel) and, later, grasps a file firmly against one of his crutches as he makes his painstaking way up to Hotch's office.

"Thanks," Hotch says when it finally reaches him. He wasn't planning to make a big deal of it, but Reid fumbles himself into the chair there so he adds casually, "How's the knee?"

"Um, it twinges a bit," he says with a wry grimace that makes it hard to tell if he means it's a two or a six on the pain scale. "Actually what I didn't expect was how tired my arms would get." (Deflection makes it at least a four.)

"Well, just think," Hotch offers, "in a couple of weeks you'll be able to give Morgan a run for his money at arm wrestling."

"I'm pretty sure he'd break my humerus. —You should give me a lift home tonight."

He feels his face still. "I'm sorry?"

"I can't drive," Reid points out with a waggle of his crutches.

"Obviously, but I assumed you'd take a taxi or Morgan would give you a ride."

"Usually he would, but I think he's asked Prentiss to take me tonight so he can stay until you go home."

Of all the meddling— But he lost his temper enough yesterday for one week (month) (year). He says instead drily, "I think I can wait him out."

"Yes, but it's a bad idea," Reid says, and heedless of how Hotch might take that continues, "You're worried Foyet's watching you. You don't want him to see you leaving work early because he'll see it as a sign his attack succeeded in weakening you. But, Hotch, if you stay too late you _will_ be tired and he'll see that too. So you should leave while you're still fresh but make it look like it's nothing to do with him."

Hotch breathes through the inevitable hitch in his pulse that the thought of Foyet brings, and thinks through the angles. Including the very real possibility that Reid's come up with this argument precisely to get him to go home early and rest. From the corner of his eye Morgan and Prentiss don't _look_ like they're watching with baited breath, but then they wouldn't.

With a quick, low urgency Reid says, "I swear I'm not telling you what to do or trying to manipulate you, I just honestly believe this is the most strategically sound course of action."

Hotch admits, "You're right."

(And he does take a secret pleasure in the startled bemusement on Morgan's face when Hotch strolls down at half past five to collect Reid. Also while his leftovers are reheating in the microwave he falls asleep on his sofa for nearly three hours, then gets another solid eight hours in his bed before the alarm clock goes off. So apparently he can use the extra rest after all.)

*

Friday passes much the same, but Saturday— Saturday hits like a freight train.

He's supposed to spend Saturdays with Jack. He's supposed to spend this Sunday in particular shopping for Jack's birthday on Tuesday. For more than five weeks he's made every decision starting with _Does this keep Foyet from winning?_ but the inescapable fact is that Foyet's already won. He's given Hotch the scars to prove it.

He gets dressed, and gathers his gun, keys, and wallet, and stands at the door for a good ten minutes reminding himself that Foyet's watching. He's not going to the liquor store for a bottle of whiskey. He's going to have breakfast, and brush his teeth, and go to the park _without_ his wallet for a jog in the sun like a man who knows his son and ex-wife are safe so has nothing to be afraid of.

Breakfast. Teeth. Park—

He's not quite halfway around his first lap, stewing on how he's doing perfectly fine and clearly doesn't need Morgan worrying about him, when he realises: Gideon. He burned out, but it's been two years. He'll understand this case is different. He'll help.

With an effort he finishes his laps at the same pace, then jogs home and looks up Gideon's latest private number. But when he reaches him, Gideon cuts him off before he's half finished his explanation. "Hotch, I'm sorry. But I can't."

"I'm not asking you to come back full-time," he says. "But this is Haley and Jack."

"I know. I understand, I really—" (The hitch in his breath reminds Hotch of another phone call, another apartment covered with blood. But it's been two years, and this is to prevent that.) "I'd be a liability."

"I don't believe that."

"Hotch—"

"Look, you don't have to come in. Just meet me somewhere, let me show you the files—"

"I can't."

"Jason, I was always there for you."

"Please don't ask me again."

He lets the silence express his disbelief. Gideon lets it express that he's not changing his mind. "Okay," Hotch says finally. "Well, screw you too."


	3. Chapter 3

He's glaring at the same goddamned files, making half-moons in his palms in his determination to get through the last half hour without a drink before he can call it lunchtime and at least eat, when a knock on the door startles him.

He checks through the peephole. (This isn't hypervigilance, it's appreciation of the fact that outside of hospital he's not subject to people walking in on him without permission or warning.) Reid balances there awkwardly on his crutches, which explains the unfamiliar cadence of the knock. Hotch opens the door, notes the set of his face, and says, "You've got to be kidding me."

Reid crutches in past him with nothing but, "I really need to sit down," for answer.

The corridor is empty otherwise. He puts the chain back on the door and his gun back on the table with his files. (Not hypervigilance. Just... common sense.) "Reid—"

"I'm fine at work," Reid interrupts as he collapses in a clatter onto the sofa, "because I can focus on the job, but right now, all I can think about is how much my knee hurts and how there isn't anything effective I can take for it, so I really, _really_ want a distraction."

"And that's me," Hotch says shortly, circling around to look down at him there.

Reid's dumped his crutches at his feet and is now hoisting his bad leg, brace and all, onto the sofa. "Yeah, that's you," he says reasonably. "Hotch, you're agitated—"

"Yeah," he cuts in before the profile goes any further. "I was thinking about going out and getting shit-faced, but sure, why not beat up a crippled kid on my sofa instead?"

"I'm not a kid and I think it's better than going out and— and getting shit-faced." He lifts his chin and lowers his voice. "Hotch, I know you're scared of really hurting me, but I'm not going to let that happen. You know how this works, you know you're not in charge—"

He says more, but Hotch is listening only to the sudden familiar rush in his ears, vision narrowing with a snap to Reid sitting there. The angles are wrong. He can't punch down like this, or kick up. He needs Reid standing. Or on the floor.

Reid's gaze is firm, his lips parted in readiness.

"Okay," he says, and circles back behind the sofa.

Reid turns his head to follow him, eyes widening. "H—Hotch?"

He takes the back of the sofa and heaves. Not slowly, this time. A steady pull giving Reid just time to grab hold and brace himself before— Something catches in his chest. He loses his grip and it drops the last few inches.

"Son of a _bitch_!" Reid shrieks.

His blood thrums as he straightens. "Too rough for your knee?"

He spits back, "Wrong quest—"

Hotch boots him in the ribs.

He's still wearing his running shoes so it's not that hard, but Reid yelps as if it were, and gasps, "Wait," before he can get the next one in. As he makes himself stand back and watch, Reid gets his good leg down by his bad one and twists himself straight so he's lying along the back of the sofa. Then, chest heaving, he says, "Okay, kick me again."

He puts more into it this time. Reid squeals and flinches even before it lands. The force flings him up like a rag doll against the seat, and his arms flail. "Wait!" cuts short Hotch's satisfaction again, and for nothing this time but for him to lie there breathing heavily.

Hotch narrows his eyes at him. He'd like nothing more than to just go ahead and kick him again, but then Reid really will stop him. So he says instead, "This isn't a demonstration, is it? It's worse than you expected because it's making your knee tense up."

"I'm fine, my knee's fine. No!" he says as Hotch shifts weight to go again. "I want you to punch me."

Fine. He gets down, one knee pinning Reid's upper arm—

"Ow, not like that."

He pulls his knee back with a forced patience. "Reid—"

"Punch me." But that only nets him one more squawk, and one more "Wait."

He goads him, "If you can't handle it—"

"I _can_ handle it, this is me handling it. Punch me."

He gets two quick ones in this time. "Ah! —Ah!" and Hotch has a warm moment of his face screwed up before he's told again to wait. Again he goads him, "You're not handling it, you're enduring—"

"Punch— What? No!" he interrupts himself, eyes flying open again. "No," he says again to the fist that's already ready to fly. "Stop talking, I— I need to think."

"So I'm right." His heart's hammering, fist shaking with tightness.

"No, and I _said_ stop talking. Don't. Speak."

"Just admit I was right," Hotch says, and punches him again, and again — knocks his warding arm aside and—

There's something sharp between his ribs. He chokes on his own breath, staring into Reid's wide, terrified eyes. The pressure increases, pushing him back, and everything goes numb.

Then a tinny voice, and as he's looking down in puzzlement Reid's lifting it to his ear and rattling out, "Hi, I'd like a taxi to pick me up outside the Langham please."

Hotch puts a hand to his ribs. There's nothing: no cut, no blood. Just his sweatshirt and the line of scar tissue and the jagged pain when he tries to breathe. He can't breathe— He— He shuts his eyes and makes himself breathe _out_ first. Hold. In. Hold. Out. His mouth tastes steel.

"And, um, I'm on crutches so if I'm not down there when they get there can you call me back to make sure I haven't fallen over? Thanks so much, I really appreciate it."

He pretended to stab Hotch with his phone to trigger what could have been a violent — a more violent— Hotch breathes through his teeth and tries not to shake as he tells him, "That was the most reckless—"

"Hotch, I swear to god if you keep talking I'm going to call 911 next, so now would be a really good time for you to shut up."

Hotch locks his eyes on the phone in Reid's hand — that's shaking too — and manages not to say anything smart about disproportionate responses. It's... maybe not that disproportionate.

Reid shoves himself to sitting and tosses a quick glance over his shoulder to where his crutches lie out of reach. "Fetch them for me." As Hotch gets up he presses back into the sofa seat, and cranes to watch him go past. As soon as Hotch passes the crutches towards him he snatches them and says, "Unlock the door a-and s-stay out of the way."

Hotch finds himself checking the peephole before taking the chain off. So maybe he's a _little_ hypervigilant.... But Reid's going out there with only a pair of crutches to protect himself, so while he's at it he opens the door and checks the corridor's clear before backing out of the way.

With a final heave, Reid reaches his feet and gets his crutches under his arms. He doesn't look at Hotch again: only propels himself out through the open door with a savage, "See you Monday."


	4. Chapter 4

Almost the worst of it is that, once the shock wears off, he feels calm. Not _good_. It's more a plodding, grey kind of thing. But the agitation is gone.

He gets to work early on Monday. Reid arrives soon after and comes straight up to his office. He's getting the hang of those crutches, Hotch notes distantly. And he looks calm, too. At Hotch's desk he draws an envelope from his satchel and sets it in front of him.

Hotch flicks his eyes down at it, as if he needed to see his own handwriting to know what it is.

"It's your transfer request," Reid confirms. "I— I don't care what I promised, I'm not giving it to Strauss while Foyet's out there. But I'm not coming back either."

With his eyes still down he says, "Reid, I—"

"Please just don't."

Which is fair. More than. As Reid executes a neat reverse two-point turn, he offers, "You can always get someone else to bring your reports up."

Quick as his crutching he tosses back, "Hotch, I've been cleared to travel, I'll carry my own files."

Alone again, Hotch opens the envelope and reads the old letter, blithely written all those months ago when he didn't even know Foyet was the Reaper. Strauss would probably have thought it a bad forgery if these words had turned up on her desk today. He should write a new one — but Reid's right. He can't transfer now, with Foyet watching for any sign of weakness.

So much for his high-minded principles. He puts it through the cross-shredder instead and turns to the rewrite she wants of his Louisville report. Why the reports he's been writing for the last eight years suddenly aren't good enough he doesn't know (though he can guess) but he does know arguing would only waste time he's already in short enough supply of.

*

 _Cleared to travel_.

It rattles around in his head all day, and it's only when he's packing up to go home (having slept most of the weekend, he's made it to seven o'clock, and Reid's already left with Morgan) that he stops to think why.

 _I've been cleared to travel, I'll carry my own files._ The two things don't follow. Arguments don't always follow strict logic — but this is Reid. Why would he say _cleared to travel_? Is there something he's _not_ cleared for? (Like, say, being thrown around on a sofa.)

Before he heads home, Hotch leaves a message requesting a copy of Reid's medical report.

*

On Jack's birthday he goes to work, finds his Louisville report back on his desk for edits _again_ , and has a whole new stack of consults from across the country to review. Rain lashes at the windows as he works.

Then his friend in WitSec brings video of Jack playing on a set of playground swings. (It's sunny there, though there's no indication when it was filmed. The swings are new, the trees old, the grass well-maintained: a small park in a good neighbourhood. Somewhere temperate— Hotch stops himself. He can't know where they are.) Jack's not as terrifyingly somber as he was in the hospital. But he's not his normal carefree self either, for all Haley is clearly trying: the Mr Silly t-shirt probably went on with a lot of tickling.

Sending Hotch the video on Jack's birthday was almost certainly her idea too. Just like in hospital, making sure they both had the chance to see the other was safe before saying goodbye. Just like she's always rearranged her schedule to let them spend time together. Like the thing they always fought over was when he wasn't there for Jack. _I don't want you to wake up some day in some random city and realise that you don't know your own son._ Only this time it's her and Jack in the random city.

So of course she's made phone calls to her mother. Hotch's friend is tactful, but the judgement's there in his tone: he doesn't understand. Her family is as close-knit as Hotch's is... fraught. Calling for advice on cheering up Jack, commiserating on her father Roy's slow recovery from surgery: it's as natural to her, as vital as breathing. Hotch is the one whose instinct under stress is to isolate himself; isolation to Haley is anathema. So what cruel twist of fate has sent her out there alone, shuttled from safehouse to safehouse, and left Hotch here with his team?

*

Back at his desk he finds Reid's medical report waiting for him. Reid must have been hyper-correcting, avoiding saying _cleared for desk duty_. Because he is very explicitly _not_ cleared to travel, due to the increased risk of blood clots.

Very nearly Hotch summons him in to tear him a new one. But how's that going to go? He stands at his window instead, watching the rain and lightning, playing it through.

_"You jeopardised your health—"_

_Reid immediately on the counter-attack: "Are you mad because I flew or because I came to your apartment?"_

Hotch has no sure answer to that. _"This is about you telling me you were cleared to travel when you weren't. I trusted you—"_

 _"Oh! Oh,_ you _trusted— Hotch, you're the one who pulled the sofa over, you're the one who tried to manipulate me into going past my limits, you're the one who didn't stop when I told you to stop."_

_"I never lied to you."_

_"You lied to Emily: you told her you didn't remember what Foyet did to you."_ Reid doesn't know that. But the fact is Hotch has no moral high ground to stand on about trust.

_"You jeopardised your health and the case. If the plane had had to land short of Louisville for you—"_

_"But it didn't."_

_"But it could have, and what would I have told Strauss?"_

_"You're worried about what you'd have put in some_ report _?"_

_"She thinks I shouldn't be back at work, Reid, and if I'm withholding evidence and assaulting my agents and can't even tell when they're lying to me then maybe—"_

"You got a second?" Dave asks from behind, rescuing him from his own dark thoughts.

They've got a case. Hotch takes the excuse of time being short to call out Reid's lie at the end of the briefing. He doesn't like that kind of public dressing down, but two sentences and the subject's closed, and when Reid tries with the backtalk Hotch can turn away and leave him to Garcia.

*

"You have a family," Dave says on the way back from Long Island. "When all this is over, what are you going to do to make sure you're not a lonely guy wondering why you let the purest thing in your life get away?"

He's projecting because of memories stirred up by the case. Dave might have let Emma get away, but Hotch... It wasn't enough that he drove Haley with Jack from an unhappy marriage, he had to set a serial killer on their tail. When you endanger someone's happiness, someone's life — when you betray their trust and assault them — the only remaining shred of human decency you can show is to _let them_ get the hell away.

(There was never anything pure about what he did with Reid anyway.)

*

Back at Quantico he heads straight to Strauss's office. Not a moment too soon: she's clearly already seen the news, because he's barely in the door when she's pulling her glasses off and asking, "What happened out there?"

They were too late, every step of the way. "Judge Schuller hired a hitman named Basola to kill five people. He put his own name last on the list, which we realised as he was being transferred out of local custody. In the confusion caused by the media presence we couldn't get the message through in time."

"And he was shot with a dozen cameras rolling."

"Agent Jareau says the news stations have all confirmed they won't air the footage of the actual shooting." It's a pathetically small mercy.

"Did you get the hitman?"

"No. We've left all our information on him with the local field office."

"Did you achieve _anything_ on this case?"

Another _no_ sticks in his throat. They saved no lives, and have no-one in custody. They might as well have never gone. "You'll have our report tomorrow," he says.

"Very well," she says reluctantly. "I still need those clarifications on the Louisville case, too."

He bites his tongue and nods. And, before she can pick up her glasses again, he braces himself and says, "You should also know that just before we got this case I became aware that Reid wasn't cleared to travel. He worked the case from here and he'll continue to do so until he is cleared."

She says flatly, "You're telling me he flew to Louisville without being cleared."

"At the time I was under the mistaken impression—"

"You mean he lied to you."

"I didn't say that," he says carefully. He can't deny it, either. "In any case, I've dealt with it and it won't happen again."

In disbelief she says, "Your agent lied to you and you're letting him off with a slap on the wrist?"

Would she prefer two kicks and six punches? He breathes, and reminds himself that he _can't_ lose his temper and get suspended again: not with Foyet out there watching. "I've made it clear to my whole team that I won't tolerate it. But Reid was only trying to do his job in an organisation that rewards bravado and treats any sign of weakness as cause for doubt and second-guessing. It was my job to shield him from that and I won't punish him because I neglected to sight the medical report."

She lets out a sigh. "Aaron," ( _Aaron_?) "I'm not second-guessing your work on these cases. But when people ask me what happened inside that house in Louisville I need to have answers for them."

"So tell them I lost control of the negotiation." Fatal mistake, but this sudden _Aaron_ has him all off-balance. He ploughs on: "Tell them we wasted our time on Long Island. Or tell them that you stand by your agents."

"You know it's not that simple, Aaron."

He knows what _Aaron_ means when Dave says it. He knows what it means when an UnSub says it. But when Section Chief Strauss says it—? It doesn't matter. He always knew there was no use arguing the point. "You'll have both reports tomorrow," he says, and beats a hasty tactical retreat.


	5. Chapter 5

The next case goes no better. He extracts the team from the situation before the actual suicide-by-cop starts, but it's not going to fool the Bureau.

He's sitting in the dark of his office when Dave and Prentiss arrive with three glasses and a bottle of scotch and he can't think of a single way to turn them away without coming across like a complete jackass or outright admitting—

He catches his hand heading to his mouth, the classic tell for holding back a secret. He converts the movement into accepting the glass, and thinks: One drink. In company. AA may preach total abstinence, but for all its prominence in popular culture, AA is something like 37th on the list of effective treatments for alcohol dependence. One drink, in company, and when Dave offers a refill he can casually plead paperwork.

It swirls into the glass with that familiar enticing glow, and the smell of it... His eyes close as he inhales. The key to covering is not to cover, so he holds them closed a moment longer and says, "You always did get the good stuff."

Dave chuckles. "Fair trade?"

"It'd be a fair trade if I made you sit and watch."

"You had a head injury," Dave reminds him.

Prentiss catches up here and says, "Oh, that is cold."

Dave returns, "You're just saying that because he's your boss."

Hotch takes a decorous sip as she denies the charge. It tastes as good as it smells: it makes it easier to hold on his tongue, stretching it out through the inconsequential banter. When Dave pours Prentiss another and tops up his own, Hotch keeps his, still half-full, out of the way. From there, one sip to their two sees him finish just before them. Dave lifts the bottle suggestively; he shakes his head; they take the hint and leave as easily as they came.

He pays for it when he's back in his apartment where the beverage options consist of water, coffee, juice, and half a pint of doubtful milk. And an old bottle of cough syrup. He washes that down the sink when he realises he's seriously considering it, and makes himself go to bed.

Not to sleep.

After an hour of trying he gives up. If Foyet's watching his apartment he'd see a light on in the lounge, but the bedroom has no windows. Hotch closes the door, shoves a sweatshirt up against the crack at the bottom, and by the light of his bedside lamp sets to the report Strauss is going to want of this latest balls-up.

*

At seven thirty, a couple of sheets of notepad paper in his hand and his heart in his mouth, he's knocking on Reid's door.

"You're early," comes Reid's muffled voice, and the thump of crutches, and the door opens: "what—" Then there's a moment of them looking at each other, and then he closes it again in Hotch's face and puts the chain back on.

To be honest this is better than Hotch expected the conversation to go.

He waits there a minute, checking up and down the corridor though he's ninety-nine percent certain Foyet didn't follow him here. Pulling an all-nighter turns out not to help the hypervigilance.

Finally Reid opens the door again, this time on the chain. "Seriously Morgan's going to be here any minute."

"I just wanted to give you this," he says, offering the folded paper.

"I don't want your apology."

"I know. It's a transcript."

"I don't need a transcript, I've got an eidetic memory."

He looks down, eyebrows lifted in acceptance of the barb, and says, "It's a transcript of when..." He _knows_ the corridor is empty, but can't shake the feeling of someone standing behind him. "Foyet attacked me."

(All-nighters have gotten longer since he was at university. Or he's gotten quicker at writing. Either way, at four-thirty he added the last clarifying detail that Strauss could possibly ask for, and all there was left to think about was what he always ends up thinking about these days. _Enlighten me about my behaviour._ )

Reid still doesn't take the chain off, but he rebalances himself on his crutches and accepts the papers. Hotch is considering whether to go right away or wait to be dismissed when Reid says unhappily, "I said some of... Wait." He looks suspiciously at Hotch through the slim opening. "Are you trying to manipulate me again?"

"No." Though he noticed those echos too: _Don't speak_ and _You're not in charge_. He supposes he thought Reid deserved to know. To what end that understanding? Forgiveness? "...I don't think so."

"Then why are you bringing this to me? Why not the rest of the team?"

_I understand that profilers think that stabbing is a substitution for the act of sex. That if somebody's impotent, they'll use a knife instead. Is that what you think, Agent Hotchner?_

Reid clearly hasn't got to that part yet, and all attempts at just saying it stick in Hotch's throat. Eventually he manages, "Finish reading it?"

Reid purses his lips, but looks down again. He turns the page. He stills. Then he takes the chain off and crutches a few steps away from the door, leaning against a bookshelf to make a phonecall. "Hey, Morgan? —Actually Hotch is already here, he wanted to talk about a case so I'll see you at work? —Bye."

Hotch comes in only as far as he needs to close the door behind him. Meeting Reid's eye is probably a bad idea if he wants to keep dispassionate about this, so he looks at another bookshelf instead. "What I need to know," he says, "is whether it does change the way we profile him. Because I told Prentiss I didn't remember any of this, but if it affects the case—"

"It doesn't," Reid says. "He wants to dominate and control; it doesn't matter to him how he does that. He didn't get the response he wanted from threatening your life so he had to try other methods. If anything, the sheer number of methods he tried suggests he doesn't ascribe any personal significance to any of them."

Hotch nods. It's the answer he wanted, which automatically makes him suspicious of it, but Reid wouldn't soothe his feelings at the expense of the case. "Thanks. I can wait in the car while you finish getting ready."

"Hotch," Reid interrupts his turning. He's frowning at the floor, working his mouth.

That, of everything weighing on his heart, is beyond all bearing. "Reid, I know how much cognitive dissonance there is when someone you trust hurts you the way I did. And I can't tell you how to deal with that: whether you hate me or pretend it never happened or... call it Mr Hyde. Just don't blame yourself for a few words you happened to both say."

"I don't hate you and I only blame myself for not thinking about how Foyet might have changed things."

He shakes his head roughly. "We're all trying to pretend Foyet hasn't changed anything. It's not working very well." And leaves, before Reid can stop him again or his voice breaks entirely.

* 

His report goes down with the Bureau about as well as he expects. It doesn't help that Detective Andrews sends in a copy of his own report, and it's not complimentary. Hotch tries to dig his heels in and make his case, but it feels a lot like lying in a pool of his own blood whispering helplessly, "My team..."

_Your team didn't catch me until I wanted them to._

Which is true. Foyet wasn't angry about being caught. He was angry because the team was the one thing he couldn't take away from Hotch. And now the Bureau is gearing up to do it for him.

Hotch can't let them. He can't let Foyet win. He _cannot_ let the team suffer as his family is suffering for his own failures.

He just doesn't know what else he can do.

*

When he finds Strauss, late at night, lying in wait for him in his own office, his first thought is that it's an ambush. "Chief Strauss," he greets her warily, hanging there with the door to his back as if he could turn and flee whatever she's come to say.

"Aaron," she says, and he recognises what that means now: pity. "We need to talk. Close the door." When he reluctantly lets it swing shut, she says without beating any more about the bush: "It's time you let Foyet win."

His eyes narrow as he tries to work out what she's really saying. "I think we're a bit beyond putting a personal in the Michigan Post."

"He's waiting for you to self-destruct like Shaunessy did. You're resisting that, but we can't find him if he's just waiting."

She's never worked in the field, but she's solved cases, and plenty of them. He makes himself listen. "What do you propose?"

"Step down as unit chief."

Hotch bites his tongue and moves slowly to his desk to give himself time to come up with a response that won't get him fired on the spot.

"It'll get his attention," she says. "He'll want to see for himself."

"Are you suggesting this," he asks in as neutral a tone as he can manage, "because you think it will help catch Foyet, or because our numbers are down?"

"I'm giving you an opportunity," she bites back, "to make the best of the inevitable."

"Which means the latter."

"It's not the numbers report. It's your performance."

He cuts to the chase: "Is someone targeting me?"

She won't be drawn. "I read your report. I recommend stepping down." She doesn't say: before he's pushed. "I need to review this with the Director."

He sits in his darkened office for a long time after she leaves. It would be easier if it had been an ambush. He'd know who to fight, then. But she doesn't need to ambush him. She could have gone straight to the Director and sorted it all out behind his back. Instead she's warning him and giving him the chance to get ahead of it.

Or manipulating him into thinking things are worse than they are — except Strauss may play politics, but she doesn't play mindgames. The fact is their string of failures isn't just a bad cast of the dice. He's been off his game ever since he came back and he can't keep denying it anymore. She's right. It's time to let Foyet win.


	6. Chapter 6

Promoting Morgan keeps the team together, at least. Foyet won't win _that_ one. It just leaves him feeling like he's shrunk a size inside his suit, and it doesn't help that Morgan's attempts not to step on his toes are as soothing as sandpaper.

Reid makes no such attempt. He manoeuvres himself and his crutches into Hotch's passenger seat at the Oklahoma City airstrip and barely waits for Hotch to turn the key in the ignition before asking, "Is this because of what happened?"

Hotch points out, "Taking a demotion would make a piss-poor penance for what I did."

"That doesn't answer the question."

The question gives him a lot more credit than he deserves. "No. It was a purely strategic decision."

Reid relaxes into his seat. He doesn't even ask what strategy, only fiddles with the GPS. But after a moment he says, "You can apologise if you want."

"Well, I do want to," Hotch says — "and I realise I can't tell you what to do anymore, but we do need to be focusing on the case right now."

"I guess you can't really tell me what to do now," Reid muses. A smug smile curves his lips as he watches out the passenger window.

Hotch snorts. It's the closest he's come to a smile or laugh, he realises, since... Foyet. He wrestles to banish the memory, again, as always. The truth is he hasn't really been focused on any of their cases since then. That's how he's ended up in this position.

And, realistically, when else are he and Reid going to be able to talk alone? He drives, and shapes the words on his tongue. "I'm sorry for manipulating you, and—" His throat locks; he pushes past it. "Assaulting you when you called me on it." He should say more, but there just aren't words. He can't even get straight in his own mind what the hell he was thinking.

"I forgive you," Reid says.

He resists the urge to argue. He doesn't even let the urge to say "Then do you want—" come to the surface. They're on a case. This is closure, no more and no less, offered so they can work together without baggage. He should be grateful for it; he is. "Thank you," he says, and means it, and focuses on the case.

*

Despite what Reid might have reasonably concluded over the last year, Hotch doesn't enjoy taking orders. (Strauss, on the other hand, would not be shocked at the news.) He's always had an instinct for how an investigation should be run, and a compulsion to make sure it is, and it's hard now to constrain himself to a quiet word of advice followed by letting it go when Morgan walks his own path.

He takes consolation that the less time he spends in the station strategising with the locals, the more time he can spend on the ground, which is what puts him in the right place to haul this week's UnSub off a fence and, as soon as his backup catches up, go to the side of the UnSub's intended victim. But Earl Bulford isn't the serial killer he wants to plant face-down on the ground. Geri Boynton isn't the woman whose safety he wants to ensure, and nothing can fill the hole that Jack's absence leaves in his life.

So back in his office at Quantico he stares again at Foyet's file and tries again to imagine where he could be and what he could be doing.

*

He keeps a low profile. He makes sure Morgan is very visibly in charge of the team, for anyone who cares to track down local news coverage. (There's a lot of local news coverage in Hollywood.) But it turns out Foyet isn't watching where they've been. He's predicting where they'll go next, making connections to a past case before they even start investigating, writing about Hotch to a serial killer who sits there laughing — in chains and an orange jumpsuit, _laughing_ in his face—

"Hotch?" Prentiss asks through the cracked door of the bathroom where he rinses bile from his mouth. He's fairly sure it's not the first time she's said his name. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," he says roughly. He's not fine. He's as cold as when his blood pooled on his apartment floor: so cold he can't feel the hot water on his fingers. They shake in front of him. He remembers them dropping the notebook on the interrogation room table, unthinking, before he turned and fled. "Have them confiscate all his correspondence and notebooks as evidence."

"They're pulling it together now." Because she's not the one who completely lost it back there.

"I'll be out in a minute," he says and, after a pause, she lets the door close. He turns the tap off and wipes a swath of mirror clear of steam. His skin is pasty, his eyes empty: he's seen corpses dredged from lakes with more life in them. He sets his jaw; it helps a little. He glares at himself. He focuses. He takes all his shock and terror and rage and pain, and he stuffs it deep, deep, deep down where it can't get in the way of doing his job.

When he sees Haley again he will _not_ have to tell her he's given anything less than his all to catch Foyet.

*

When he sees Haley again she has brown hair, and a pool of blood in the hollow of her throat.

*

With all his strength he's been focused on bringing Foyet to justice. But somewhere in their tumble down the stairs — with Foyet's smirk stuck in his mind's eye, and Foyet's taunts ringing in his ears — his fierce determination turns to plain ferociousness. He stops fighting to win and starts fighting to destroy.

"Okay, you got— you got me," Foyet says, laughing in his face. "I surrender."

But it's too late for that. He started this and Hotch is going to finish it. He puts his fist through that smirk, and lets the familiar rhythm take him: punches, and punches, and punches. Despair fuels his blows, and each blow fuels his despair, because as hard as he punches, nothing can bring Haley back. Nothing can return Jack's innocence. Nothing can undo what Foyet did to Hotch, or unmurder all his victims in Boston. Hotch could keep punching until the end of time—

In the end, Morgan has to pull him off the bloody pulp that was once a face.

*

He finds Jack safe and sound. He holds Haley one last time: she's already turning cold in his arms. Eventually he wipes his eyes and pulls himself jaggedly together and plods out into the harsh light where life goes on.

Reid with his cane puts in a quick intercept course.

Hotch meets his eyes and looks away again. "You should go in and see him," he says in a low voice. "That could have been you."

And without waiting for an answer he plods on past to where his son needs him.


	7. Chapter 7

He plods through the hearing. He plods through the funeral arrangements. When Jack wakes in the night crying, he runs to him; and when Haley's father shouts at him over the phone, he stands there in silence; but it's all the same plodding. Among the sympathy cards he spots a mourning dove, and when he sees Gideon's signature he tears it in half and half again. Then he plods to the kitchen to dump it in the trash and Jessica, watching, doesn't ask.

At least, from sense or cowardice, Gideon doesn't show for the funeral. Neither does Sean, despite three messages on his voicemail. Haley's parents are there, but when Hotch begins to speak Roy turns his back and hobbles away with Margaret hovering by his side in case his knee gives out again. Hotch plods on with his speech.

She died protecting Jack, he says. It's a pretty platitude, but the fact is if Jack hadn't been there she'd have died just the same. She didn't choose her death. And he doesn't have the comfort of it being some tragic mischance either. She was targeted — not even because of who she was. Not from jealousy of her new job; nor revenge for some ancient schoolyard grudge; nor ambition and the petty politics of a preschool PTA; nor greed for the lovingly hoarded mint-condition action figures from her father's old shop. Nor even lust. Hotch knows a thousand motives for murder, but this wasn't even something as meaningless as the colour of her eyes or the fit of her jeans or a passing smile at a stranger in the street.

She was murdered for one purpose only: the effect it would have on _him_.

Grieving her, letting Foyet win again, feels like the most selfish thing he's ever done in his life.

*

That record stands until he takes Jessica up on her offer to help with Jack so he can go back to work instead of taking Strauss's offer of early retirement.

He was all set to accept a transfer. Some nice stable nine-to-five desk-job that would have had him crawling out of his skull within three days, but Jack needs him (and if he'd taken it two and a half years ago like Haley wanted, none of this would ever—) So he was going to grit his teeth and bear it. 

But retirement, never having to work again, being there for Jack 24/7— It's exactly what Jack needs, and he feels nauseous at the very thought.

He's tried to talk himself into it. He was terrified at the thought of having a child at all, once, and that's worked out okay. He hasn't hit Jack once yet. He's never even raised his voice at him. Not yet. But 24/7, and no work....

He remembers, after Milwaukee, after coming back to a dark house, he told Haley he'd take the transfer. He'd quit, if she wanted: anything to keep his family.

"Aaron," she told him, her voice low and angry and aching, "you just spent two weeks moping around the house because of a temporary suspension. And the first chance you got to be back on a case, you just couldn't help yourself." He tried to argue, but her final word was, "I don't want Jack growing up with a father who's so desperate to be somewhere else you can't even look him in the eye."

He remembers, before Milwaukee, sitting miserably at the breakfast table as she tried to soothe him, keeping his answers minimal so he wouldn't be tempted to snap. He remembers he did snap when she caught him packing: sharply enough that she'd fallen back in shock. She says— She _said_ that she wasn't afraid of him, that he wasn't his father — but how long would it be before he began to resent Jack for taking him away from the BAU?

Maybe the scotch Dave handed him after the funeral, and that he eventually made himself leave untouched on the porch railing, isn't the addiction he should really have been worried about. Maybe he _should_ go cold-turkey on the job.

And maybe that's the most dangerous thing he could do.

(He still remembers the feeling under his knuckles of torn flesh and shattered bone.)

So once Jack's past the first clingy phase, and has settled back into the routine of preschool and daycare, he goes back to work. He doesn't know if he's doing the right thing or the easy thing, but he has his suspicions.

*

There's a suggestion that Morgan stay on as unit chief for some unspecified adjustment period. Morgan flatly refuses, and Strauss makes it go away. Hotch still doesn't understand where her antagonism towards him turned to support, but he'll take it. He'd be out of a job if she hadn't guided the hearing the way she did. If not in jail: Reid clearly didn't volunteer to them what Hotch told him on the front lawn either.

He takes Morgan's help with the paperwork too. And Jessica's help with Jack. And it's still _hard_. There are times when he wishes he'd taken that retirement. There are times when the only thing keeping him going is knowing that at eight in the morning he can let someone else take care of the moodswings while he escapes to Quantico to bury himself in another case.

Wiping Jack's tears away again makes him tired. Dealing with a tantrum over sandwiches cut the wrong way exhausts him. Watching him watch that birthday video of Haley for the two or three hundredth time breaks his heart. And when Jack laughs at a dog in the park it takes every last ounce of energy to dredge up a smile of his own when instead he's thinking: Haley should be here to see this. Haley _should be here_.

*

Reid hangs back on the jet when they land back home from Atlantic City. Hotch is usually last off, and it was a quick flight so he's still squaring up the files he's been reviewing. He glances up at Reid as he does it: "Is something wrong?"

"Um, I just wondered if you had a few minutes, but it can wait if you need to, uh..."

He shakes his head with a gesture out the window at the dark. "Jack will be asleep by the time I get home anyway. What's up?"

Reid checks to see if the rest of the team is out the door — not quite — and takes his time sitting down on the other side of the small table. It's not his knee that makes him shift uncomfortably. He's off his cane now and has even been cleared for fieldwork — by a real doctor this time. If it wasn't for how hard he's worked to achieve that, Hotch might suspect this sober demeanour heralded a resignation.

Reid checks the aisle again, then shifts defensively and juts out his chin like he's expecting an argument and means to see it through. "Hotch, I've thought about this a lot and I need you to hear me out."

Maybe it's a resignation after all, Hotch thinks, and folds his hands in a listening attitude.

"I'd like to go back to— to telling you to hit me," he says, "and I know you're afraid of hurting me, but, Hotch, I really think that what happened with Foyet was a unique outcome of the extreme circumstances he put you in."

_What happened_ , as if Hotch himself had nothing to do with it. He feels the urge to rub his knuckles, as if that could rub away the sense memory of bone grinding against bone. Of blood drying into a crust on his skin... Reid talks about adrenaline and cortisol while Hotch studies how clean his clasped hands are, and when he stops it seems too much effort to look up again.

"Maybe that's true," he says, mainly because it'd just waste both their time to spend half an hour arguing the point.

Sensing a _but_ , Reid leaps back into full-blown discourse mode. "That's not to say I'm forgetting what happened the last time I visited you. But I think that if we analyse the factors involved in that, then we can determine the precautions we need to take next time. And when you think about it I _did_ control you then too."

With a cellphone between his ribs. "You did," he agrees.

"I know you've got Jack now so we can't meet as often as we did before, but if there are times — like now, when he's already asleep — and of course we can use my apartment."

He's thought through every angle, and Hotch is still sitting there trying to... think, to... imagine them just starting over — to even remember last time or the time before that. It's not that he's forgotten. It just feels distant, like something he saw in a movie twenty years ago. All the emotion bleached out, though he knows for a fact he felt it at the time.

"Hotch," Reid says after a long silence, and it's about time Hotch look up at him now. His eyes are sober as he says, "You don't want to hit me, do you?"

He doesn't _not_ want to: none of the aversion to it a normal person would. But... he remembers that two years ago when Reid said _Hit me_ his mouth went dry and it was all he could think about. Now there's nothing. The disconnect is disconcerting. He searches for something by way of explanation and comes up with a wry, "I guess I've done enough hitting to last me a while."

"I don't think that's it," Reid says, studying his face with a light crease to his forehead. "Did you know since we started talking about this you've shown an almost complete absence of affect?"

He cocks his head. He's never been accused of being overly expressive at the best of times, but he supposes Reid has calibrated for that. "Well, between work and Jack I'm probably a bit tired."

Reid opens his mouth, then changes his mind and shuts it. Instead he nods and stands up. He's turning to go when clearly he changes his mind again. "Hotch, I know it's none of my business." Meaning: Hotch's mental wellbeing. Meaning: like it had been none of Hotch's business, on another plane trip, to suggest Reid finish his 'movie'. "And I— I think it's completely normal, after what's happened, for it to take some time to— to heal. But if it takes longer than you think it should then there are some really good child psychologists, so it wouldn't..."

Go on his medical record, he deciphers from the lacuna. No-one at the Bureau would blink if _Jack_ needed a psychologist, and if Hotch just happened to be accompanying his four-year-old son at the time.... But it's really not necessary, for either of them. "We'll be fine," he assures Reid. It doesn't look like quite the answer he was looking for, so he adds, "Thank you."

Reid chews on his lip briefly, then nods again and this time heads down the aisle to collect his bag and leave. The plane is very silent when he's gone. Hotch sits there, mulling the conversation over, until he hears the cockpit door open. Then with a rough shake of his head he grabs his files and his briefcase and heads for home himself.


	8. Chapter 8

Seven months later on a Saturday morning he looks at Reid's apartment door, and lifts his hand, and knocks.

Reid lets him in without comment or apparent surprise, and Hotch finds himself studying the bookshelf again, because he hasn't planned ahead enough to what he's going to _say_.

That he's been doing better, really? That he got through JJ's forced transfer with only some passing guilt at being a team leader who couldn't look after his team; a profiler who couldn't protect his own family? That he got through a year since Foyet attacked him, a year since he last saw Haley alive, and it _hurt_ still but it was better than numb and really he was doing fine? And then he came back from the Appalachian Trail not daring to sleep for fear of nightmares — knowing they found the boy but the UnSub is still out there — and three days later still all he can hear in his head is the father's voice, over and over: _I was his hero, and I failed._

Finally Reid ventures, "I know it's about to be Jack's first birthday since Haley died."

He quirks his eyebrows bleakly. It was never _about_ the Appalachian Trail. "Yes, and it's probably going to be his last one before her mother dies of cancer."

Reid opens his mouth and shuts it again, which pretty much sums it up. You can throw in there that Haley's father blames him and his job for her murder, which is true enough to hurt, and even for her mother's cancer, which isn't completely out there either. If she hadn't been mourning Haley she might have noticed something wrong early enough.... But even without the sordid details, Reid gets the general idea. "I'm sorry."

Hotch summons painful breath. "So I know after everything I've lost the right to expect—"

"Hotch," Reid says, "you never had the _right_."

He flicks his eyes to Reid's face: serious, but not presaging rejection. It means yes, but it isn't yes _yet_ , so he makes himself breathe through the uptick in his pulse, past his fist curling at his side. He makes himself say neutrally, "You said we should talk about what happened and work out—"

"Not today."

"Reid, I don't particularly want to talk either, but—"

"No, Hotch, you— you're on probation. Either you do exactly what I say or you go home."

His fist curls tighter as a dark fog swirls. He bites his tongue and struggles to sort through the affront and relief and desperation and hopeless rage: everything that's hammering on the inside of his skull, howling to get out. Stuffing it all back down he admits, "That's fair."

Reid frowns, and chews his lip.

Second thoughts would be fair enough too, but— "Just... tell me what you want me to do."

He shakes his head. "No," he says, and lifts his chin in determination, "you tell _me_ what you want to do, and you wait until I say you can do it."

He's been planning this for seven months, Hotch thinks through the ringing in his ears. He lets out a deliberate breath. "I _want_ to hit you so hard you trip over your own feet."

Reflexively Reid shifts those feet, seeking a better balance. "One punch."

"To start with."

"One punch," he repeats, jutting his chin out even higher, more daring perhaps because Hotch can't hit that without leaving one hell of a bruise: "go ahead."

Hotch measures what it will take to drop him with one punch. He's not as much smaller than Hotch as he acts, and doesn't trip nearly as easily as he thinks he does. Taken by surprise, perhaps — and just as Reid remembers he has a right fist too he moves, swings his left after all and lands it near Reid's shoulder, with follow-through that spins him and makes him stumble.

He flails and barely catches himself on the back of the sofa: Hotch counts it a success. Even though he barely catches his breath before saying, "What next?"

"Pull you off of there."

"That's not a full sentence," Reid notes.

He forgot how much Reid likes playing games. "I _want_ ," he grits, "to pull you off of the sofa and throw you to the floor."

"Okay." He clutches at the sofa back and, when Hotch easily hauls him off it, to Hotch's sweater sleeves. It takes a couple of rougher shakes and shoves to disengage him from there, but then he's rolling on the ground and Hotch is looming over him.

"I want to kick you," he says, chafing at the time it takes to say.

"Where?" Reid gasps, because of course he does.

"Your thigh." To start with.

"Okay."

He kicks it hard, adding over Reid's yelp, "And the other one."

Swallowing heavily, Reid says, "What about it?"

Both fists clench. "I want to kick it. Twice, and while you're trying to get away from me I want to boot you in the rear. Then I want to get down and slam your shoulder back on the floor, knee you in the gut, pin your hands under your back and _then_ ," he hears himself say, "I want to start hurting you."

Reid's eyes are black, cheeks flushed and lips parted. "Y-you can kick my thigh," he says, faintly breathless.

So is Hotch, and almost shaking with the urgent need— Forcing his driest tone he says, "Can I kick it twice?"

"Um," Reid says consideringly — Hotch nearly growls — "yes, okay."

He gives in. No more attempts at verbal fencing: he just aims the two kicks and feels them land, sees Reid flinch and hears him whimper. "Can I boot—"

"Ow, yes — oww!" he says as Hotch's foot punts him ass over backside, and twists into an awkward half-seated position where he can keep his eyes on Hotch.

"Can I slam your shoulders down?" Hotch asks, and "Can I kick your legs?" and "Can I punch your ribs?" And each time Reid gulps in a breath and says "Yes," and a moment later yips and writhes in pain: each time a moment's thrill, too soon gone. "Can I punch the other side?" he asks, his chest tight with the need for it — tighter and tighter as Reid delays his answer, and he doesn't mind the games but he _needs_ this. " _Reid_ , can I punch—"

"Say 'please'," Reid gasps.

"Please can I punch—"

"Yes."

It's no more satisfying than the blows before. "Again — please," he says, voice cracking — "can I please hit you again?" Reid twists himself straight again, silent except for a pained grunt that gives no permission. "I want to punch your gut: please, I _need_ —"

"No, th-that's enough."

And everything dissolves so suddenly he almost collapses. _Will_ collapse— "Can I p-please use your bathroom?" he asks, and is halfway there as soon as Reid gives his yes.

His face is wet; the door blurs in front of his eyes. He opens and closes it behind him more by feel than sight and braces himself on the handle as a silent sob tears out of his throat. Another, and another wracks his chest. He gives in again, and slides to the floor, and cries into his sleeves and the knees of his pants until it hurts, until he can't breathe, until all he knows is crying.

*

When he finally emerges, half going on three quarters of an hour later, he feels like a wrung-out dishrag — but calm, too, in a way he's realising he hasn't felt in a long, long time. He's also still a little red around the eyes, but Reid, sprawled on the couch with a rug and a thick book, doesn't really look at him even as he says, "There's juice on the bench."

He finds the glass sitting in a pool of erstwhile condensation, now thoroughly room temperature. He doesn't think he really needs it, but the sweetness isn't as sickly as he's expecting and once one mouthful is down his throat the rest seems to just follow.

The room meanwhile is silent except for Reid's rhythmic turning of pages. Two piles of library books are on the floor next to the bowl of discarded icepacks: read and to read, Hotch guesses.

He finishes the juice and, after a moment turning the empty glass in his hand, leaves it in the sink. Returning, he ventures, "I, um, don't know if you want to keep doing this regularly again."

Reid leaves a finger between the pages when he looks up. "Given the constraints we face it's probably more accurate to say 'irregularly', but yeah, I'd like to. —Do you?"

"I..." He's managed this long without it, but realistically it doesn't look like his life plans to settle down any time soon. "Probably. Yes," he adds when Reid keeps looking at him.

"Okay," Reid says, and returns to his book.

It's a clear dismissal, and Hotch has no reason to argue it. He leaves, and heads back to his car to meet Jack at his grandparents' house.


	9. Chapter 9

Margaret makes it to Jack's birthday, and eight days longer. It's quick at the end. People share pretty platitudes about that, too, at the funeral, which Hotch is only allowed to attend when Roy finally concedes that someone has to bring Jack, and that Jessica has too much else to organise.

But when he talks about taking some time off so she doesn't need to take care of Jack for him, she looks devastated. "I'm sorry — I know he's your son—"

"And he's your nephew," he says quickly. "I just thought you might like some time to deal with everything."

"It just... _really_ helps to have someone I can look after, and— she loved him so much—"

It isn't her tears that makes him look down. It's the echo of those words from among the last Haley ever spoke. It's that he's not sure whether she means Haley or Margaret because it's just as true for either of them. It's that she wipes her tears away exactly the same way as Margaret did — as Haley did.

(He doesn't ever recall seeing his own Mom cry. Not even at Dad's funeral, though she was suitably sombre. Dad certainly never did. So Hotch can only cry in extremis, preferably in private (on the floor of an agent's bathroom) — but the Brooks women always shared their tears as they shared their joys. And now Jessica is the only one left of them.)

"Well, I can play it by ear," he says. "Just let me know if there's anything I can do to help."

Because he's never going to be able to repay her for how much she's helped him since Haley died.

*

After they get back from the gated community in Las Cruces, Reid catches him up in the elevator and waits for the doors to close. "Are you heading home to sleep?"

It's what he told the rest of the team to do, since none of them got more than that couple of hours on the plane. And he has several hours before Jack should be picked up from preschool, but he never was any good at sleeping in the day, let alone when he's just had to shoot a man and reprimand a trainee agent.

(A trainee who seems to think apologising to a victim's family on behalf of all serial killers' families everywhere could possibly mean _anything_ to _anyone_. Does she think a victim's family is so starved for condolences that they'll want anything to do with the family of the man who's demolished their whole world? Except of course sometimes they do, and he can't make her mistake of bringing his own issues to the job.)

Truth be told he was probably going to end up doing paperwork at the kitchen table. "I can... make a stop on the way."

Reid fidgets in his pocket. "I want to, um, kind of talk about what happened last time I visited you."

"'Kind of talk'?" Hotch echoes. Reid's only answer is to produce a key. An apartment key. "Reid, what—"

The elevator settles on the ground floor. Reid doesn't move. Hotch takes the key and pockets it just as the doors open, and Reid slips out ahead of him.

*

He doesn't recall seeing an alarm system in Reid's apartment, but still steps in with some trepidation. He finds the lightswitch and shuts the door. After a moment's deliberation he leaves it unlocked and puts the key on the nearest flat surface.

The room is very quiet. The furniture's been rearranged into approximately the same floorplan as his own apartment. It's meant to make him think about what he did; it's working.

At least Reid doesn't make him wait long. He does knock and make him open the door. Without entering he notes, "Last time you checked through the peephole."

"You want me to close it and try again?" He says it without snideness — barely.

"That's okay," Reid says, pushing in past him. He doesn't go straight to the sofa this time, only waits for Hotch to close and snib it. "You had your gun too."

"I've got it now too," he deflects.

"Why?"

And he really doesn't want to hear any nonsense about how Hotch hasn't had time to go home and put it in the gunsafe. He means last time. "Hypervigilance."

"You thought I was Foyet."

"No," he corrects, "I just didn't know who was knocking and... my instinct at the time was to take precautions."

"Huh," Reid says, and carries on to sit on the sofa. He lifts his leg up a lot more easily than he did a year ago, but the angle of his back is the same — disconcertingly so. "Then you put it on the table."

Hotch finds another flat surface to put it on now, and joins him at the sofa. "And we argued. Did you want to recreate that, too?"

"Um, no, I think we established what it was I said that, uh, affected you, so you can just go straight to pulling the sofa over now."

He swallows on the faint taste of steel that even that reference to the memory of the memory brings. "Okay," he echoes a year later and a lot more reluctantly, but if this is how Reid wants to deal with this then this is what Hotch owes him. He circles around back of the sofa and takes hold of it. Knowing what comes next, this time, Reid has already braced himself in position. So he pulls. Firm and smooth, watching the wide eyes watching him.

Then he reaches the same point he did last time, and again something catches in his chest. In his breath, this time, a hard choking lump, and his grip if anything tightens on the sofa.

"Drop it," Reid says.

He hesitates — finishes lowering it and straightens.

Reid, still braced there, looks up at him faintly indignantly. "I said drop it, why did you put it down?"

With a shake of his head he says, "I'm just not that comfortable with repeating that particular assault and I don't think it's necessary."

"Well, I— I don't think you've got a problem with assaulting me, I think you just don't want to examine what went wrong."

"We both know what I did."

"We don't both know _why_ you did it," Reid retorts lightning-quick.

"It doesn't matter why I did it: I did it."

Reid's gaze turns more evaluatory. Hotch holds his eyes steadily, but Reid only relaxes — topsy-turvy between sofa seat and back with a leg still hooked over the edge — and asks, "Why did you drop me?"

"I didn't—" He cuts himself off. But Reid waits for him to finish the sentence, because clearly he's not denying he did it. Letting out a heavy breath he finishes: "mean to. I must have strained something and I just lost my grip."

"Why didn't you say so?"

"Reid, come on," he says, more impatiently than the question deserves. "When have I ever complained about a booboo?"

Reid accepts that with equanimity. "So the reason you goaded me then was just to prevent me suspecting you were hurt." When Hotch looks away rather than admit to it he accepts that too and says again: "Drop me."

Hotch eyes him there, bracing himself again. He bends, hefts the sofa up — Reid swallows — and lets it slip out of his fingers as he steps back to keep his toes out of its way.

An involuntary shriek escapes Reid, cut off by the bass crash of the sofa on the wooden floor. The sounds rumble through Hotch's chest and he makes himself breathe slowly as Reid catches his own breath. "You want me to keep going?"

"Kick me," Reid confirms. So Hotch boots him in the ribs, as near as he can remember to where he aimed last time; Reid squeaks and flinches, but holds on and says, "Harder."

He does, trying not to enjoy the noises so much: that's not the point of this today. When Reid says another determined, "Harder," he makes himself ignore the thrumming of his pulse and says, "I was wearing my running shoes. It wasn't that hard."

"P-probably you over-compensated. Hotch, it was fine, _kick_ me."

And — despite the twist of guilt in his gut — he does, and Reid yelps properly this time. "Ow, shit, that's right — just a minute—" With face wincing in pain, he brings his leg down and twists and gulps a breath as Hotch tries to blink away the encroaching dark swirl. "Okay, again. Harder."

Harder: his shoe connecting with bone, Reid's shriek, and his body thudding up against the seat and thudding back down again. He feels like he has double-vision, how it was and how it is, at once intoxicating and nauseating. "I knew it was too much for you," he admits. "I was afraid you'd tell me to stop: that's why I kept goading you."

"It wasn't really too much pain, I just knew I couldn't control you up there so I needed you down." As if the words themselves draw him, Hotch kneels over him. "On my arm," Reid reminds him. And hisses at the weight, but doesn't tell him to get off at once. "It wasn't too much," he repeats with a strained voice, "I just didn't want you pinning me."

Hotch takes that for a signal that he can get off, and it's not because he wants to get to the part where he punches him. It's not. It's—

"Punch me," Reid says.

One punch. Even as he throws it he remembers: one punch is never enough. "You told me to wait and I didn't want to."

Reid takes a couple of quick breaths and says, "Twice."

Twice isn't enough either. Not now, not then. "Usually— part of me wants to stop but then I didn't, so I— kept goading you—"

"But I figured it out."

"Yes." His fist is still tight, again shaking.

"And I told you to—" He doesn't say the word, _stop_. "I said I needed to think."

"I didn't _want_ you _thinking_. It wasn't about what you said or what Foyet said. I just wanted to keep hitting you, so—"

When he chokes on it, Reid finishes for him: "So you did. Go on. Do it."

He punches, and punches, and knocks aside the warding arm — but he remembers, and this time he sees the cellphone and grabs the wrist—

"Hotch," Reid says, and for a moment they stare at each other, eyes into wide eyes. His grip is too tight, but he can't— "Let go."

He does, swallowing, and watches Reid put the cellphone away. He'd never have taken that for a knife if he'd been in his right mind. "It wasn't reckless," he admits. "You didn't have any other options."

Clinically Reid says, "I think I was most reckless when you were first coming around the couch behind me: I saw something was wrong but I— I wanted to keep going instead of taking the time to figure it out."

"Reid—"

"Hotch, I'm not blaming myself, it's just not really _helpful_ to focus on what you should have done differently when the point of this is for you to trust me to— to control it. And that means I can't let it _get_ to a place where I only have one option, and the reasons that happened are firstly because I was already in pain so I wasn't thinking clearly, and secondly because I never planned for a scenario where you'd manipulate me. But in the future I can take both of those into account so I'll have more control."

He feels himself subside, but it leaves him off-balance, walking a narrow beam he's unsure how to dismount from. He tries a wry, "So you're saying I'm not in charge?"

Reid looks smug. Then he says, "Keep hitting me."

It's so easy to fall: to throw one more stunning blow at his chest, to grab him by the shoulder and flip him, to pummel at his back even as he thinks this isn't fair, he's supposed to be learning his lesson from this, not enjoying it—

"Stop," Reid gasps at last.

And so natural at that to fall back. He slumps heavily back on his haunches, wiping his hair off his face and feeling unaccountably warmed. Or maybe he's just out of shape. Absently he watches Reid clamber to his feet and head to the kitchen for juice; after a moment he comes to himself enough to stand up too and heft the sofa back in place.


	10. Chapter 10

It takes the edge off things; it doesn't solve them. Especially not when they keep on coming.

Jessica confronts him after another case, worried about Jack. He misses his Nana, and the loss has brought up old memories. Hotch knows that. (That old grief is freshly painful for him right now too.) He knows the funeral triggered the old nightmares again, too; he just thought it had only been a couple of nights. He thought wrong.

"And he's been... clingy isn't the word for it, Aaron: he _howled_ when I tried to leave him at preschool. Trish had to promise he could phone me during the day, and he has. Twice."

Unhappily he reasons, "He's lost his mother and his grandmother, he's probably afraid of losing you too."

Jessica lowers her voice like Haley always did when she was really serious. "I know you don't want to take him to a therapist—"

"I just... think that what he needs most is a sense of security, and a regular routine is the best way to give him that."

"I know. But if he wasn't getting better from a cold you'd take him to the doctor."

He looks away. He wants to say it's not that bad, but if it wasn't that bad she wouldn't have raised it. She's never questioned any of his parenting decisions before, and she doesn't question it now when he tells her he wants to see how it goes over the weekend. She just gives him a bleak acknowledging smile, one that doesn't quite believe a weekend will make any difference but knows it's no use arguing about it.

(Haley's smile.)

*

The nightmares persist. And, triggered by his son's cries in the night, Hotch's own bad dreams start back up: lying on the floor, the knife hot and heavy on his stomach, utterly paralysed as Foyet strips his own sweatshirt off and turns to Jack and says, _Is that what you think, Jackie-boy?_

But Hotch can banish his own bad dreams, and has been since he was ten years old. Jack is barely five. He's too young for this. And Hotch is running out of ideas to help him, and the sleep disruptions aren't doing either of them any good. So finally he grits his teeth and makes an appointment.

*

Jack sits against him tight as a limpet. Hotch puts an arm around him, trying to project a relaxed reassurance while also trying to ignore the fact that this office, with its comfortable sofas and strategically placed children's toys and drawings, looks exactly like every other child psychologist's office he's been to on a dozen or more cases.

(Including Karl Arnold's, who four years later taunted him with Foyet and laughed in his face—

(Including Arthur Malcolm's, who molested at least a dozen prepubescent girls before Reid demolished him. And bare hours later Reid was earnestly advising Hotch that there were some good child psychologists out there, if he needed to use Jack's visit to one as cover for his own head shrinkage.)

He's not nervous that the psychologist might turn out to be dangerous. He's nervous that it's not really possible to dig into Jack's anxiety without turning up a whole lot of dirt about his environment in general, and Hotch in particular — and is this why he delayed bringing Jack so long? If all these sleepless nights could have been avoided if he'd just taken Reid's suggestion in the first place—

Jack's own wariness of the stranger is simple shyness. (Maybe. Or maybe he's picking up on Hotch's reserve.) But after some skillful warming up he answers his questions about preschool, and friends, and softball before going off on a surprise tangent about soccer. He even says a little about Jessica, and even Margaret, before burrowing back in against Hotch's side.

The psychologist neither pushes it nor gives in. Having established rapport he simply changes the subject, bringing up the nightmares, and in short order Jack's at the coffee table with paper and crayons to draw a picture of them.

(Hotch isn't fresh off the boat. He _tried_ that. But Jack said, "It's only a dream, Daddy, it's not real. How about we read a book?" and Hotch realised the words he'd meant to soothe him had instead somehow ended up contributing to the problem. There are times when he really doesn't think he's cut out to be a parent at all.)

While Jack draws, the psychologist settles in the armchair beside Hotch. It's positioned so they can watch Jack together and talk without making Hotch feel either confronted or forced into unwelcome intimacy. "So the hard question," he says, and Hotch braces himself for something probing that will reveal all his insecurities. "What do you want out of this for Jack?"

Hotch blinks in surprise. And doesn't have an answer. "That is a hard question," he temporises.

The psychologist nods and watches Jack draw while he waits.

_What do you want?_ Hotch remembers Reid asking all those years ago; and his own non-answer, _What I want I'm not going to get._ Because what he _wants_ is for Jack to have no reason for this anxiety. For Margaret to be alive and well. For Haley to be alive, teaching him how to laugh and how to cry and how to heal.

"I know I can't undo what's happened," he says, "and I can't even... guarantee the future."

_What do you want when you can't get what you_ really _want?_

"I just don't want him growing up dealing with things the way I do."

"How's that?"

Beating the snot out of a man who's as screwed up as he is. Luckily he's already looking at the picture emerging on Jack's paper (the smaller figure is Jessica, he thinks; the larger one is the unknown subject of the nightmare) so he doesn't have to worry what his eyes are giving away. "Bottling it up. I think—" He steadies his voice. "Haley was worried about that when... we last talked."

Jack turns around, his face somber. "I finished my picture."

Hotch puts on an encouraging smile. "Is it really all finished?" With half a leg missing off the large black figure it doesn't look finished: it looks like Jack doesn't want him talking about Haley.

"Yeah," Jack says in determination. The psychologist joins him by the coffee table and resumes getting him to talk about his nightmare, while Hotch just does his best to stay out of the way and not make things worse.


	11. Chapter 11

Hotch is presenting a case when Reid comes in late, rules lawyering all the way. He then spends the better part of the case distracted and/or retreating into dimlit corners, and finally goes off to confront the UnSub on his own. As the murderer is carted away, he accepts the bracelet offered by the last intended victim, but won't tell Hotch what it's meant to protect him from. Instead he spouts some bullpucky about having faked a headache to distract the murderer, and evades further questioning by the simple expedient of fleeing the scene.

Dave watches him go, then turns to meet Hotch's eyes with a knowing expression. "What are you going to do?"

He shakes his head. His heart is still pounding from the action and the terror of a team member in danger: it's not a good time to be making rash decisions. "I don't know. I need to read the after-action reports."

(But he has a pretty good idea.)

*

Back at Quantico he's nearly run out of reports to read when he spots Reid packing for home. He just catches him down at his desk. "I need to talk with you before you go."

Reid pulls his satchel on over his head without looking at him. "I've actually got an appointment right now so it'll have to be later," he says, and flees again.

Everyone in the bullpen stares and looks to Hotch for his reaction. He gives them a flinty look back, and they hastily resume their work. Then he returns to his office and phones Jessica.

*

He doesn't really expect Reid to come back to the Bureau, but he gives him a chance before driving to his apartment. The lights are off, but he knocks anyway and Reid answers, squinting.

"For the avoidance of confusion," Hotch says, "I'm here as your supervisory agent."

"It's past eight o'clock," Reid objects.

"Yes. It is."

Reluctantly Reid flicks the lightswitch on and lets him in.

The furniture is back where it should be, Hotch notes, but that's not why he's here. He's only giving Reid time for his eyes to adjust to the light, before he turns and says flatly, "You went off on your own. You endangered yourself, the team, and the case. Do you have _anything_ to say for yourself?"

"Um, I took down the UnSub," he says indignantly.

"But you shouldn't have done it alone, and we've talked about that before." Reid scowls and glues his lips together. Hotch measures the way his eyes still seek the shadows, and paces two slow steps before stopping to speak again. "Reid, I came here to fire you, so now would be a _really_ good time to talk to me about this headache."

Reid looks up with an outraged denial on his lips, and immediately flinches from the light Hotch is now standing in front of. "Ow! Okay, fine: I've got a headache, it distracted me and I wasn't thinking, Hotch, I _swear_ it won't happen again."

"You went to the hospital?"

"They couldn't find anything."

Hotch notes the results are back already, which means the headache had been bad long enough to visit before the case — but he also notes Reid's still being evasive. "If this has anything to do with me hitting you—"

"You never hit my head and they couldn't find anything physically wrong. Ask them if you don't believe me."

Hotch looks at him for a long moment. He thinks he believes him. (He wants to.) Finally he says, "I'm suspending you for a week—"

"That's not fair, I—"

"—And you _won't_ get another chance, because we've also talked before about you misleading me about your fitness for the field. That ends now."

Reid ducks his head: not from the light this time. Meekly he says, "I really didn't know it was going to get that bad."

"Now you do."

He nods, a very quick small movement which might be pain or might be remorse. Perhaps both, considering he's finally stopped arguing.

And that lets Hotch switch down and more gently say, "Reid, that's a hell of a headache."

"It's actually mostly been better since last night, I'm just trying to keep it from coming back."

"I noticed you've been wearing that bracelet Julio gave you."

"It's an ilde," he corrects, shoving it up his arm as if belatedly to hide it. "The alternating yellow and green beads represent Orúla, the orisha of wisdom, knowledge, and divination. He's also associated with St Francis of Assisi and healing, but cases of religious healing generally come down to the placebo effect, or to the fact that many ailments self-resolve anyway."

Hotch shrugs. "You know, Jack's been having these nightmares so finally I took him to see someone. He got Jack to come up with a story about a dream he wants to have instead, we practise him telling me about it, and I don't know how it works but the nightmares have stopped."

"I don't think my headache's really like that."

"What I'm saying is that brains are complicated. If it works, it works."

"I guess so." He rubs his wrist, but just as Hotch is about to go he says, "I think it would work better if you hit me."

Hotch studiously ignores the kick in his pulse. "I told you I'm only here tonight as your supervising agent."

"You could go out and come in again," says the rules lawyer. And when, briefly, dangerously, Hotch lets himself entertain the thought, he adds, "We could both use it, we probably won't have another chance soon, and if you're still worried about my head you can p-put me over your knee and spank me."

He feels his nostrils flare despite himself, and sees Reid see it. It doesn't help that there are days like today when a part of him is convinced Spencer Reid really does need a good spanking. But the better part of him still _knows_ that study after study after bitter personal experience proves violence is the single worst disciplinary method there is. "No," he says, and turns to the door.

In frustration Reid argues, "Hotch—"

"Good night," he says firmly, opening and stepping through the door. "I'll call you if I can get away."

"Don't put yourself out," Reid retorts pettily, and bangs the door shut behind him.

*

He's in the shower, halfway through a round of masturbation-as-substitute-for-violence, when the door opens and Jack pads in. Swallowing a groan he grabs the washcloth as a backup to the shower curtain. "Hey, buddy, what are you doing up?"

"Where's Jessica?"

"She went back to her apartment when I got home."

"Can we phone her in the morning?"

"Of course," he says. It's a big improvement on wanting to phone her then and there. "How about you go back to bed now and I'll be there in a minute to tuck you in."

Jack pads amenably out again and, gritting his teeth, Hotch turns the water to cold.

While he's being tucked in, Jack tells him the latest variation on the dream he wants to have. It doesn't go on as long as the nights he's really anxious, when he's procrastinating on closing his eyes. But then he asks, "Daddy, do you get bad dreams too?"

 _No,_ he wants to say. _Nothing scares Daddy, and when you grow up nothing will scare you either._ But he can imagine the disappointed look Haley would give him if she heard that. "Sometimes," he admits. His pulse speeds up just at that. "Sometimes I dream that I'm looking for a bad guy" (searching through the darkened rooms of the apartment, or of their old house) "and when I find him he wants to hurt me." (Or Jack, or Haley, or the team. And he doesn't just want to: he does, and there's nothing Hotch can do to stop him.)

"But it's just a dream," Jack tells him reassuringly.

"That's right, it is."

"What do you want to dream instead?"

"Well," he says, taken aback, "I guess instead of looking for a bad guy I could be looking for you because we're playing hide and seek. And then I could find you — and tickle you — and then we could go and get icecream."

"I want icecream in my dream too," Jack declares.

"Then you'd better close your eyes and see what happens," Hotch says, and kisses him goodnight.

*

He dreams of blood on his living room carpet. Heart pounding, he draws his gun and creeps to the kitchen — where he finds Reid with a decapitated cat, feverishly drawing chalk symbols all over the floor. "Reid," he scolds him, "we've talked about this before." He hauls him up, throws him against the counter, and spanks him there as Reid whimpers and cries out—

Dream rehearsal is clearly not (he thinks in the morning, taking a shower with the door _locked_ this time) an exact science. But it's sure better than nightmares.


	12. Chapter 12

Reid gets back to work before Hotch can get away from it. Then there's a case in Montana and by the time they're back at Quantico it's closing in on midnight. So not only is Jack long asleep but so is Jessica: no-one will notice whether he gets home an hour earlier or later. But Reid hasn't so much as glanced at him the whole flight home, and debarks between Morgan and Prentiss without once looking back.

Hotch drops his files off in the office before heading to his car. His fingers tap on the steering wheel a moment, because it'd be just like Reid to be freezing him out in petty revenge. But if that's what he wants then he can do it just as well in person and get it out of his system, so Hotch drives to his apartment anyway.

Reid opens the door a narrow crack. "It's twelve seventeen a.m.," he notes acidly.

Hotch glances down and up again. "For the avoidance of confusion, I am here to spank you."

"You're assuming I want to be spanked."

Hotch considers his dilated pupils, parted lips, word choice, and failure to use the chain when he answered Hotch's knock. Then he shoulders the door open and shuts it behind him. Reid is still stumbling back when Hotch grabs him by the arm and hauls him to the sofa.

"Over your knee," Reid reminds him in a gasp. So Hotch spins him to face him again, and attacks his belt. He squeals. "What—" He chokes himself down to a loud whisper better suited to the midnight hour. "Hotch, what are you doing?"

He explains the obvious: "Pulling your pants down." Which would go more quickly if he didn't have to keep knocking Reid's hand out of the way; it only works at all because Reid needs his other hand to keep from tumbling backwards over the sofa.

"I just d— I'm not sure I really — Hotch!" he squeals again as the zip goes down.

Though he's still not saying _don't_ he is starting to hyperventilate, so Hotch leaves it for the moment. Instead he hauls him back up and shoves him around the sofa. And then, quickly, he kicks Reid's legs out from under him, sits down on the edge of the sofa, and yanks him down over his knees.

The kick gets another muffled squeal, and the landing of gut on knees forces out a huff of air that reminds Hotch viscerally of that first punch three years ago.

"Still breathing?" he checks. Reid's answering hiss is ambiguous, so Hotch tugs his pants down enough to expose his boxers and an inch of thigh. _That_ gets Reid's chest heaving again. "Good."

"D-don't laugh."

He freezes halfway through trying to hook Reid's flailing arms between his shins. Some quality of that particular stutter makes him say, "Reid—"

"I'm fine, just don't laugh. Keep going." When Hotch still hesitates he repeats, "Keep going or let me up, Hotch: you _said_ you were here to—"

A hard smack stops him complaining. It also releases a tension in Hotch's shoulders he never even realised was there. Like last time he spanked him, he feels every quiver of Reid reacting and then adjusting to the pain; unlike that time he's not holding him at arm's length, and the sensations thrill through his whole body.

He adds two more smacks, pauses to get Reid's squirming under control, then sets up a leisurely rhythm. One he can savour: the swing and the smack, loud in the night as Reid jerks and squeaks in reaction. _Transfer of kinetic energy_ : but it's transmuted too, because the tension draining out of him doesn't flow into Reid. Instead Reid, between smacks, hangs more limply, as if the laws of the conservation of energy have been suspended.

He doesn't bother varying speed or force, but at some point Reid starts to whimper quietly. _Don't laugh_ echoes in his head, and his contentment comes out instead in a deep sigh. A distant part of him notes his arm is tiring, and nearer the surface he feels the strain in Reid's breathing. He ignores them both — ignores Reid's distressed, "Hotch. _Hotch!_ " — because this is just fine just the way it is.

"Stop," Reid says abruptly. He extracts his arms from between Hotch's shins as he tumbles to the floor and lies there in a heap.

Hotch catches his breath while his surroundings slowly filter back into focus. His palm is aflame: he's going to feel it tomorrow when he's writing reports.

"Get an icepack," Reid mumbles.

"I'm fine."

"For _me_ , Hotch!"

He grimaces at himself and gets up. "Juice?"

"No, I'll get some warm milk."

By the time he's brought the icepack back, Reid's got his pants back up and buckled. Hotch leaves him arranging himself gingerly on the sofa and returns to the kitchen to deal with the milk. (And does quietly squeeze a spare icepack in his hand while he's stirring it.) Over his shoulder he asks, "So, is 'Don't laugh' a general rule?" It seems safest to ask it casually and from far enough away that Reid can pretend not to hear it if he wants.

There's a long enough silence that he starts to think he'll have to take it as one. But finally Reid says, "No, usually I kind of like making you laugh." Emphasis on the _making_ , says his smug tone. After another pause he adds too off-handedly, "Just not when I've got my pants around my ankles."

"That's reasonable," Hotch agrees. Reid doesn't volunteer anything else and Hotch doesn't pry. Instead he puts his borrowed icepack back in the freezer, finds a mug to pour the warm milk into, and leaves the saucepan in the sink with a half-inch of water.

Reid half sits up when he brings the mug over. "Thanks. Snib the door?"

"Sure," Hotch says. "See you tomorrow."

He's nearly at the door when Reid says, "Hotch, wait—" He's twisting himself around, wincing at the movements and still looking more confused than Hotch ever recalls seeing him. "What did you do to this milk?"

He blinks at the non-sequitur. "I heated it with a teaspoon each of brown sugar and vanilla essence."

"You've got a _recipe_ for warm milk? I thought it was just milk. Warmed."

"I... guess it's just one of those things every family does differently." Reid still looks dumbfounded. "Did you want it plain?"

"No!" Reid says, drawing the mug possessively closer.

He laughs at that. (Which Reid may not have intended, but he doesn't seem too put out by it.) "Good night, then."

*

Thinking about it, he must have learnt how to make warm milk from Mom. After all, he didn't come up with the 'recipe' from thin air. Haley's family always made cocoa. (It's what he makes for Jack, now, too.) So he learnt it as a child, and Dad certainly never touched a saucepan in his life. And that leaves Mom.

But the scent of it lingers in his mind, warm and sweet, like a mother's tender love. And that's not something he associates with Mom at all.

His mind keeps niggling at it, focusing on that smell, trying to conjure up the memory—

There is no memory, he tells himself. It doesn't matter. It's just warm milk.

*

When he next visits Reid, there's a new text on migraines sitting on a table. "You got a diagnosis?" he asks.

Reid scowls and turns the book upside-down, like that will help. "I thought you were here to hit me."

"I am," he says, more warily. "That doesn't mean I don't care how you're doing."

"I'm doing fine. How's Jack doing?"

Hotch lifts his eyebrows mildly at the deflection so blatant it's more of a counter-attack. "He's actually doing really well. The psychologist really helped him."

"It's not in my head," Reid snaps.

Ah. Of course with his family history — if the hospital told him they couldn't find a physical cause, a mental one would be his biggest fear. "Reid, we have a high-pressure job. I'd be surprised if a headache _wasn't_ at least partly stress-related. Do you have one right now?"

With another scowl Reid says, "That isn't really any of your business."

Because he's not here as Reid's supervising agent. But— "I think if I'm going to hit you—"

"No," Reid says, and the word jolts Hotch to stillness. "You— You're trying to manage me but the problem is, Hotch, _you're not in charge_ here. _I_ decide if you hit me or— or if you go home. — _Don't speak_ ," he puts in when Hotch opens his mouth.

He doesn't quite close it again: he needs to breathe through it. Reid didn't have to use those words, except to provoke him.

Wide-eyed Reid watches him, judging just how provoked he is. "If it hurts too much _I'll_ st— make that call, so th-there's only one question you get to ask me."

Hotch is provoked enough to deliberately seal his lips at that and give Reid a sardonic look: he can't ask anything if he can't speak.

But Reid says, "One chance. Ask it." And swallows, his adam's apple bobbing like a cork. There's nothing in the slightest commanding about this scarecrow stuffed with defensiveness and nerves. There's only the certainty that he's just pig-headed enough to go ahead and make Hotch leave if he doesn't get that question exactly, word for word, right.

"Please," Hotch says — and there's nothing in the slightest pleading in his tone, and Reid swallows again — " _may_ I—" he steps forward and Reid stumbles back — "pound you into so much jelly."

And Reid gives a quick terrified nod, and he does.


	13. Chapter 13

For everything else going on in his life, he's not completely oblivious to Prentiss's distraction. If he had been, he'd surely still have noticed the variously puzzled and worried glances the rest of the team have been throwing at her. And bad traffic would make the national news before it kept her from getting to work on time.

But he's been figuring it for her own nightmares (they all have them), or possibly boyfriend troubles, or more likely her mother. Not a past life undercover among international gun runners now back to haunt her.

("I guess maybe I compartmentalise better than most people," she said once, when it was Reid in mortal danger.)

When he realises she's run to protect them, something hardens in his chest. It hardens even more when they find her (hurt — dying) and not Doyle (in the wind — free to try again) and he realises what he has to do.

This is not why he called JJ onto the case, but without a question she helps him fake Prentiss's death. Her matter-of-fact efficiency reminds him how much he misses her. "I'll tell the team," she adds, and when he objects she points out, "I can cry."

"They won't expect me to cry."

"But if they see me crying they'll believe it more quickly."

She's right. When she comes into the hospital waiting room with red-rimmed eyes, the team reacts before she's even said a word. Raw shock, naked grief. It feels obscene just to see it. As she folds Reid in a desperate hug to keep him from trying to visit the non-existent body, something hard in Hotch's chest quietly crumbles and he thinks: he did this.

*

Jack's psychologist left them with another exercise: setting up a regular time where they light a tea candle and "talk to Mom" about their day. This is transparently a mechanism to help them talk to each other, and at five and a half years old Jack is a lot better at it than Hotch is.

He can't lie to his son, he tells himself, staring at the candle. He can't say they caught the bad guy. He certainly can't say no-one died. He has to— He _has_ to say _something_. "I didn't have a very good day," he manages, and if this is the understatement of the year, at least it's a statement. He even manages to push on: "One of my team... had to go away." (No-one will raise an eyebrow at him not wanting to tell his already traumatised son about another murder.) "And we're all really going to miss her."

Jack hugs him tightly, and Hotch wraps his arms around his small back. (He's not even very good at hugging his son, as often as he tries. Every time he does, his arms feel awkwardly placed and he can't help thinking that Haley would have known how to do this properly. Haley would have— But Haley, like Prentiss, isn't here.) After a long moment Jack asks, "Do you feel a bit better now, Daddy?"

He feels a sharp sting in his eyes, and the sucking hollow in his chest aches all the harder. "Yeah," he says, pulling back with a smile as fake as the hug. "Thank you, Jack, that makes me feel a lot better."

(He really _meant_ not to lie to his son.)

*

There's another funeral. After an interval the Bureau probably considers to be decorous, there are psychological assessments of everyone in the team. At least he convinces Strauss to let him do those himself. At least they don't have to expose their grief to a stranger — and he needs to be sure, too, that none of them suspect—

None of them suspects a thing, and he leaves the building that night feeling worse than ever.

By the time he gets into town, JJ's propping up the bar with several empty shot glasses in front of her. JJ can hold her liquor better than that, so he suspects the bartender's already cleared away several more. He orders club soda for himself; JJ looks askance at him, but he uses his prepared excuse: "I've already had enough of Dave's scotch to last a month."

(One glass. It's certainly enough to set him up for a month of cravings.)

JJ puts in for another pair of shots before the bartender can escape. Then she asks, "How're they doing?"

He looks at his hands on the bar. They look cleaner than they feel, given he's the one who caused the grief he's just spent the day prying into, like a voyeur who returns to see how his crime has affected the victim's family. "Well, you were right. They're going to be okay."

Their drinks come back. JJ takes one of her shots immediately. Hotch turns his soda around on its mat. Finally he takes a breath and adds, "So Morgan asked who I talk to."

She snorts. "It's like he doesn't know you at all."

He quirks his eyebrows self-deprecatingly, and takes a sip of the soda for lack of anything else to do with it. After Dave's scotch it just tastes sour. "He's got a point, though," he makes himself say. "I mean, we all know it's not healthy bottling things up...."

JJ shakes her head, rather more firmly than he thinks she would sober. "No. Some things— Some things just hurt too much to put into words. _I_ get that." She downs her second shot (tenth? more?) like punctuation.

Hotch holds another sip of soda on his tongue until the hard lump in his throat subsides and lets him swallow it. JJ meanwhile frowns at her empty shot glasses, and looks to see where the bartender's got to. Before she can wave him down again Hotch asks, "Did you make that trip you were talking about?"

"Yeah." She smiles grimly. "Caught up with an old friend."

"How's she doing?"

He shouldn't have said _she_ , he realises a moment too late. But no-one's paying any attention to them, and JJ doesn't even notice. "She seemed okay. Considering she's just lost—" Her voice cracks. "Lost everything." She wipes at an eye and Hotch sees her face crumple in pain, and just as quickly harden in rage. Turning back down the bar she shouts, "What's a girl got to do to get a _drink_ around here?"

"JJ," Hotch says ineffectually.

There follow a few tense minutes, but he manages to extract her from the bar without the bartender calling the police either on her (for smashing a shotglass on the floor) or him (for what he imagines looks exactly like a clumsy abduction: he's not sure whether it's his credentials that eventually do the trick or JJ startled into declaring, "Hotch wouldn't hurt me! Hotch wouldn't hurt anybody!")

The evening air quiets her. But by the time they've reached his car the tears have returned, and she spends the whole way back to her house sobbing inconsolably while Hotch, beside her, is helpless to do anything but drive.

He parks and waits for the storm to abate. Finally she snuffles and says, "You're a good friend, Hotch."

"JJ... this isn't about Prentiss, is it?"

As if she didn't hear him she laughs and adds, "And a _really_ good liar."

The words feel like a punch in the gut. But she wouldn't laugh about how they're deceiving the whole team. Not even drunk. "What do you mean?"

"You told me Dave got you drunk, but here you are—" She leans over to pat the steering wheel and hits the horn instead, and Hotch spends the next few minutes manoeuvring her out of the car and into the house and Will's care.

And before he even gets back to the car he gets a text from Reid.

*

He shouldn't be here, he thinks even as he climbs the stairs to Reid's apartment.

Reid wants this because he's grieving Prentiss, and he thinks she's dead because Hotch is lying to them. (Because if Doyle is watching them he has to believe he's succeeded: he _has_ to believe she's dead.) Is there anything more perverted than to lie to his team and then take advantage of the grief that results from that lie? If it was for money it would be called obtaining by deception. If it was for unprotected sex, a halfway decent prosecutor could make a case for rape. This—

The law hasn't even imagined this.

He shouldn't be here, he thinks as he lets himself into the apartment.

Reid's been crying too. The sight brings up an unaccountable rage in him. He makes himself look away and stuff it down, down — but it keeps leaking up again around the edges, and swirling around his vision. "If you want to talk," he tries.

"I don't want to talk," Reid says, stepping provokingly into his personal space. "I want you to hit me."

He reminds himself, through the dark swirl, that _he caused this_. Somehow it only makes it worse. "Reid — _my_ head isn't in a good place right now."

"Hotch, I know, and I _promise_ I can control this. That's why I've waited three weeks, and I'm confident—"

He makes himself breathe — tries to unclench his fists—

"I— I know this is reminding you of— of when Foyet m-murdered—"

Hotch hits him (he's wrong) and hits him (he's _wrong_ ) and hits him (this is nothing _like_ when Foyet murdered Haley). He loses track of how much he's hitting him. (What this is _like_ is when he sent Haley into WitSec to protect her, and she was _terrified_ of leaving her whole support base behind — losing everything—)

(Somewhere the punches turn by necessity into kicks.) And he talked her into it anyway. Because Foyet was out there, so he promised — to _protect_ her — and then Foyet _still found her_ and—

He doesn't remember hearing Reid tell him to stop, but he finds himself, chest heaving, standing in a corner of the room over a tangle of limbs and wide eyes. His own face is wet. And he's still furious. He says, "I thought you weren't supposed to let yourself get in a place where you've got no options."

"I've got options."

"Yeah?" Reid's backed into a corner with a heavy bookcase on one side and Hotch blocking the escape. He's got no weapons to hand — Hotch isn't even wearing his ankle holster tonight — and his phone is on the other side of the room. "Prove it," he says, drawing his leg back to—

Reid lunges, not for escape but to heave the bookcase — Hotch spins to get out of its way — and from the other side of the room Reid says, "Hotch, _stop_."

The bookcase stays bolted to the wall. Hotch is less steady on his feet as reality rushes back at him. "I'm sorry," falls hopelessly from his mouth.

"It's okay, you stopped."

"That's not—" He swallows the rest of the sentence. What he meant he can't say. He can't tell Reid, _I lied about Prentiss._ He can't tell him, _And then I used you—_

"Hotch, it's not your fault." Hotch gives him a look there where he leans against a table, favouring one leg and hugging a rib and earnestly saying, "We all knew something was wrong and I tried to talk to her, I even told her about my headaches but she still wouldn't say what was going on. That was her choice — to protect us."

"You don't protect people by lying to them," Hotch says harshly, and bulls out of the apartment before he says anything else he shouldn't.

(He still sleeps that night better than he has in three weeks.)


	14. Chapter 14

He clashes with Strauss again over the grief assessments: specifically his own, or the lack thereof. He shouldn't be surprised. He shouldn't even be so averse to it. It's not like he hasn't survived one psyc eval after Foyet attacked him and another after Haley's murder. With another one now he'll be well on his way to a free coffee.

But on both those occasions, everything he felt was appropriate to the situation, and all he had to do was... adjust how he presented it. Now — Reid might assume his guilt is the guilt of a unit chief who's lost an agent, but that's because Reid _trusts_ him. Lying to the face of a psychologist who's _looking_ for lies would be challenging enough when he's what passes for emotionally stable, let alone right now. He just can't risk it.

So he's seriously considering reading Strauss in (he trusts her marginally more than a Bureau psychologist who'd only have to confirm his story with someone else anyway to rule out delusions) when she does a complete about-face on him. Now she's happy with the assessments, happy with the team, and wants him available to supervise some departments for a few months while she's...

That part she doesn't explain. When he asks she avoids his gaze, sucks in her lips, and visibly composes herself. It doesn't look like loss, or illness: it looks like shame, covered with a battered veneer of pride.

It's a shock, after a year and a half of her treating him almost like he's human, to suddenly be confronted by the fact that so is she.

*

A week to the day after last time, Reid suggests another visit. Hotch pleads busy with Jack, and spends the next two days wondering which is worse: causing the grief and then using it for his own comfort, or causing the grief and then leaving Reid out to dry.

So the least he can do is agree when Reid asks if he'll go with him to the gun range. It's halfway through Reid's "So I was thinking we could go over at four thirty, then we can both go straight home afterwards," that he realises he's being set up.

"Go on, Aaron," Dave puts in with a smirk — ostensibly on his way to get coffee, really because he has a knack for being exactly where he can be the most annoying at any given moment — "you deserve an early night for a change."

He gives Dave a look, but agrees, "Four thirty," and pretends not to notice the mutual congratulations being exchanged behind his back as he returns to his office.

*

When they've gathered their safety gear and extra ammo and are shut in alone at the gun range he points out, "We agreed you wouldn't risk arranging visits in public like that."

"Technically—"

"Don't."

He grimaces at the reproof but, not much daunted, suggests, "I guess you'll just have to punish me."

"I'm not using corporal punishment," Hotch snaps. (There's a thrumming in his pulse that wants to disagree.)

"Well, you can't really put a reprimand on my file," Reid points out. He finishes loading his gun while Hotch stares at him trying to work out if that was really intended as coercively as it sounds. "Count how many I miss?" he says then, and puts his ear muffs on. "I want you to hit me the same number of times."

"Reid," he starts, but Reid is lifting his gun and he has to pull his own muffs on before he blows his eardrum again.

Reid's not that bad of a shot these days, but the drills add up, and despite himself Hotch finds himself counting.

*

He could just not go up there, he thinks as he parks his car. Jack would hardly mind being picked up a little early for a change.

The problem is that Reid knows he wants this, and knows he's got time to spare, so if Hotch doesn't go then he'll start asking questions that Hotch can't answer.

But the real reason he walks in the door and shuts it behind himself is because he's got that number burnt in his skull and his pulse thumping out an insistent, counting rhythm. "Ready?" he asks.

"Do you remember the number?" Reid counters.

"Well, I don't have an eidetic memory but I'm pretty sure I can remember the number twenty-six."

"Okay, then I'm ready."

Hotch throws a solid punch to his chest: one.

Reid makes a note of complaint in his throat, then gasps, "Remember to count."

"I remember," he says and hits him again, in what would be the same place if Reid didn't flinch before it lands. _Two_ thunders in his head. If Reid wants him to count aloud he can say so.

Instead Reid, already breathing unsteadily as he gets his balance back, says, "Keep hitting me right up to the count—"

"I know," he interrupts, and jabs at Reid's hip. (Three.)

"Ow! I— Whatever I say."

"What do you mean?" he asks, eyeing up his options for the next punch.

"Whatever I say keep hitting me up to the count," Reid blurts in a rush to finish before Hotch hits his chest again (four: hard, because he clearly hasn't been hitting hard enough yet if Reid's still this vocal).

"Okay," he agrees, watching Reid stumble back again and flail for a handhold that isn't quite there.

"Even if I say 'no'," Reid says — Hotch pauses mid-pursuit at the word — "keep hitting me."

"The rules—"

"Are you hit me when I tell you to hit me and I'm t-telling you to hit me until you've reached the count, so _keep hitting me_."

It's very easy to subsume his feeble qualms under the pull and thrum of the count. Another punch (five) drives Reid back against the sofa.

Choking off another cry, he says, "Even—" He gulps for breath. "Even if I say to stop—"

"I _get_ it, Reid," Hotch says, and hauls him around to shove him at the sofa from the other direction (six), and pound a shriek out of his back (seven), and—

Eight.

Nine.

Ten, and the punches become the count; the count drives the punches; both echo the muffled crack of the gun firing in Reid's determined hands.

Eleven.

When you practise enough the gun comes to feel like a part of you. To look is to aim, and to want a hole in the target is to put it there. He's never before imagined what it feels like to _be the gun_ : to be the extension of someone else's will. But here Reid's pulled the trigger and Hotch puts a fist in his ribs, twelve.

Reid howls and claws his way along the sofa back for escape. But he pulled the trigger so now (thirteen) he's spasming under another punch, dropping to the floor in agony.

It's not like Hotch (following him down) is just watching through safety glasses and ear muffs. He's very present. He's more than present: he's the instrument of it all, and all of it reverberates through him. He just couldn't stop it if he tried, any more than a bullet can stop flying through the air, and that (fourteen, straightening out Reid's attempt to curl into a protective ball) is somewhere on the line that divides exhilarating from petrifying.

Meanwhile Reid is breathing hard enough to turn his whimpers to sobs. He tries to curl away again, and again Hotch slams him (fifteen) back against the floor. "Hotch, wait, just a—"

But whatever he says, he pulled the trigger. Hotch feels his fist tighten, his arm pull back, the weight of his shoulder behind the punch. (Sixteen.)

Reid yowls, and pants, and sets his jaw. _Seventeen_ gets only a cut-off squeal, his face screwed up in the utmost determination, breathing out and— _Eighteen_ makes him scream again, and kick out, and blurt a wild, "Stopstopstop, what I tell you three times is true." Hotch hears himself laugh, a harsh and ugly sound. "I mean it—"

"Have I miscounted?" he asks. (He hasn't.)

"No, but—"

So he can't stop, he thinks desperately, and hits him again. _Nineteen._

"Please," Reid shrieks, "I'm sorry, I just— just miss Prentiss—"

That's wrong. Hotch blinks, trying to figure out _what's_ wrong while his arm shakes with the strain of readiness. Not the shriek, or the begging, or the terror in his eyes. Those are all warmly familiar. No, it's that when Reid says her name at all these days he says "Emily". "Prentiss" is for Hotch's sake. Reid watches him, swallowing, because it's for _this_ : to make him stop and think — or think and stop.

His fist opens and he leans on his palm on the floor. His laugh this time is warmer, borne of relief. "That's your safeword now?"

"I—I guess so," Reid agrees with a tentative smile. "I— You've stopped?"

"Yeah," he says, knowing it's true as he says it. "I've stopped."

Reid slumps back on the floor, shutting his eyes. (As if it's never entered his mind that Hotch might ever, ever lie to him... But that's a distant thought right now.)

He wipes his hair back off his damp forehead and goes to fetch some icepacks. When he lifts his arm to the freezer it shakes from the exertion; the rest of him feels simultaneously drained and giddy. Reid accepts them with the same satisfied exhaustion, dragging himself up to sit against the sofa so it pins one against his shoulder while he clamps the other to his side.

Shaking his head on a helpless smile, Hotch says, "You just can't resist giving me those demonstrations, can you?"

Reid glances up at him, then down. "It, um..." His next look up is more determined. "It wasn't really a demonstration. And I'm fine. Hotch, the only reason I'm telling you is because we agreed when we began that this wouldn't work if we weren't honest with each other."

"You wanted to push your limits. And when you realised you'd pushed them too far it was too late." The terror was real. But he's not afraid now: the comfortable way he's settled in that vulnerable position displays a complete, instinctive trust. _Honest with each other._

"I forgot it wasn't about my limits, or the... pain. It's about control. And ultimately I _did_ stop you, so I— I actually feel really good. How about you?" he finishes with a gulp.

"Honestly?" Hotch says. "Pretty amazing." (It's about the only thing he can be honest about at the moment.)

"But?" Reid prompts.

"Well, I'm a bit concerned that I just agreed to beat you up without a predetermined safeword."

Reid grimaces. "I won't make you do that again," he promises. Because of course he takes full responsibility for the whole thing. And Hotch is feeling too good to argue with him over it — or maybe just too guilty.


	15. Chapter 15

It's not like he's never kept a secret from his team before. He never told Garcia that her meddling with his transfer request and sending him the Milwaukee file played a role in Haley leaving. (It wouldn't be fair for her to blame herself when he'd have just found some other way to finish screwing up the marriage anyway.) He never told Dave, let alone Prentiss, that going over the head of the whole State Department to get Paul Silvano's diplomatic immunity revoked pissed off a lot of people with long arms and even longer memories. (It wouldn't be fair for them to blame themselves for something that mightn't even happen.)

And it's not like lying to save Prentiss's life is objectively worse than lying to spare them some guilt. They'd have done the same thing — at least, some of them would.

They wouldn't go and beat up Reid afterwards.

*

Week after week after week, and a good part of the anger he takes out on Reid is anger at himself for the secrets enabling the blows he's inflicting. It's as vicious a cycle as when he drank — which he's _not_ going to think about; not with Jack now to look after — and as seemingly inescapable. So when Strauss hands over some delegations and quietly goes... wherever she's going... he thinks maybe it's not such a bad idea for him to be too busy to visit Reid for a while.

Which is when someone with long arms and an old grudge hits them with staffing cuts.

And this is when Dave decides it's a good time to plot bringing JJ back.

Hotch nearly takes his head off when he finds out he's been talking to her about it, getting her hopes up. Even if they weren't meant to be _cutting_ staff, the Pentagon's not going to let her go. He knows: he did try.

But he also knows Dave's right about how miserable she is there. (He remembers her sobbing in his passenger seat and, even drunk, deftly deflecting his question about it.) So he does the only thing he can do: he screws up his pride and makes a call.

*

Strauss meets him at a coffee shop. "I've talked to some people," she opens.

"Can we do it?"

"It's possible. There are conditions."

There'd have to be. He braces for them and nods.

"They want you to take a temporary assignment overseas," she says bluntly. "You'd be leading an investigative task force — the details are need-to-know."

He feels his heart beat faster. "How long?"

"A few months."

 _Months?_ "What about Jack?"

"They'd cover any additional costs for his care while you're away. It's nearly summer; he could go to camp—"

"I'm not sending him to camp." It comes out sharper than he meant; he hears her take in an exasperated breath, so quickly he tacks about. "In any case, you need me covering while you're on leave."

She shifts uncomfortably, and reaches for a packet of sugar; tears it open. "I can come back early," she says, pouring it into her coffee.

She's been planning that leave for months. "You must really want me gone."

"For god's _sake_ , Aaron!" Her palm slaps the table; sugar crystals scatter from the empty packet in her fingers.

Hotch keeps his voice very, very even. "I just think we might as well stop beating around the bush. We both know you've been packing my bags since the moment we met."

"You've been daring me to!"

They stare at each other for a long time. His heart is beating ninety miles an hour. Through all the scents of coffee permeating the shop, what he smells is warm milk with brown sugar and vanilla. He looks at her greying blond updo and the powdered foundation she uses to conceal the lines on her face, and finds himself wondering what his mother looks like these days.

(He never has forgiven Mom for packing his bags for boarding school after that last fight with Dad.)

He makes himself put all that to one side. He _makes_ himself look down. He says flatly, "You said 'conditions'."

She pauses before answering, but not by much. "Lose two FTEs and put a plan in place to manage your team's leave balances."

He turns it over. If she meant two agents she'd say two agents. FTEs is the term used on the organisational charts he's been poring over, and on the organisational chart they have vacancies in both the communications liaison and profiler positions. If JJ fills one... Slowly he admits, "Agent Seaver's considering taking a transfer to Andi Swann's unit."

(He's just not sure if she was considering it before she and Reid saw him arguing with Dave. Reid himself has offered to take a sabbatical to write up his latest thesis: it wouldn't address Dave's portion of the leave balance problem, but it might get the team's total low enough to appease the bean-counters.)

"It'd be a good move for her," Strauss says. "New agents are expected to get experience in different areas."

He feels his head cock at something... satisfied... in her tone. As if this was exactly according to plan. Two FTEs — and all the departments she's asked him to supervise in her absence have their own positions unfilled and agents ready for promotion or retirement. She's been preparing them all for months, or more, so they can come through a staffing cut exercise without any real losses. If Dave hadn't brought JJ into the equation they could have wiped two vacancies off the chart, let Seaver take that next step in her career, hired a new profiler and still passed for the poster child of Bureau right-sizing.

He says as he realises it: "You knew this was coming."

"Well, if I'd have known it'd be this week I wouldn't have taken leave right now." Defensively she busies herself in taking a mouthful of her coffee. She grimaces at the taste, as if it wasn't what she'd have chosen to order.

"What I meant..." Already confused, he finds himself watching her set the cup clattering on its saucer. Her hand shakes. "Is... everything okay?"

"It was just hotter than I was expecting," she says without quite meeting his eyes. She wipes her hand on a paper napkin; despite her makeup, there's a faint sheen to her forehead. "Was there anything else?"

"I..." Sweating, he diagnoses; shaking hands; that same shame he's noticed before; and he _knows_ that feeling of taking a mouthful of something and being reminded it's not whiskey. Irritability, though in fairness that one was provoked. He knows why she's taking leave — and that she wouldn't thank him for noticing any of this. "I know this leave was important to you."

"Yes, well," she says brusquely, gathering the straps of her purse. "It turns out I'm not the vacationing type. Let me know what you decide."

He stands up automatically as she does. "Of course. And... thank you." And stands there as she nods and strides away with her head held high; and stands there with everything he's ever thought he knew turned upside down.

*

His head roils all the way home. Every bar he passes tempts him to stop, just for one drink while he gets it all straight. Once he's with Jack it's easier, because a five-year-old demands constant attention — but he still has that nagging thought in the back of his mind: Jack or JJ. A few _months_ —

And when Jack is sleeping peacefully, Hotch is left with laundry and dishes and a good handful of unsettling revelations: That all along, his goddamned screwed-up subconscious has been comparing Strauss to goddamned Mom. That all along she's been quietly managing things so the team wouldn't be broken up. That while he's been blaming her for trying to get rid of him — of JJ — for at least these last two years it's all come from outside her control.

(He should have known all along. "It's an Executive decision," she told him when the Pentagon took JJ. "They're not asking you. They want her—" _They_ , just like today: "They want you to—" A few _months_ away from Jack.)

And the reason Strauss took this leave was to detox, and he remembers the hell of withdrawal even more viscerally than when he and Dave drank to Prentiss. (It's a really good thing he doesn't keep any alcohol in the apartment anymore.) She's detoxing and still willing to cut her leave short to help them get JJ back. Being driven up the wall with nothing else to think of, maybe, but—

A few _months_. But if he doesn't— He _promised_ JJ when she left that he'd try to get her back. How can he fail her, like he failed Haley, when she most needs him; when all it will cost him is a few months?

A few months away from Jack. The look Haley would give him—

Everything would be so much _simpler_ if Foyet had just gone ahead and killed him instead.


	16. Chapter 16

When he finally sleeps he has nightmares. Not Foyet, after all: the old ones from his childhood, that he can never quite remember when he wakes up but which leave him with something that isn't quite a headache. Something like his skull tightening in on his own brain.

And it's Saturday, and Jack is his normal bouncy self, which is great. It's great, except a normal happy child isn't always a _well-behaved_ child, so Hotch spends the morning saying things like "You can't go to Little League in your pyjamas," and "Shoes go on your feet, not your hands," and "You can be Spiderman this afternoon," and finally "Jack, get _off_ the table and go and get dressed, _now_!"

The shout echoes. Jack stares at him with eyes wide like saucers. Then he scrambles down and flees to his room, slamming the door behind him while Hotch literally bites back the impulse to shout at him for that too.

His heart pounds and his skull tightens even more, or maybe it's the other way around: the overwhelming pressure of so much confusion and helplessness stuck inside a head that doesn't know how to make room for them. So out it comes just like Dad taught him, raging against a boy too young to understand it wasn't his fault. Maybe he _should_ go overseas, and stay there, and let someone raise Jack who won't just perpetuate the same goddamned cycle.

Dave arrives here with his usual impeccable timing. Hotch pulls himself together enough to let him in, then goes to knock on Jack's door. "Jack, Dave's here. Can I come in?"

"Yeah. I'm getting dressed, Daddy," he says earnestly.

He's got on his shorts and his top, and is wrestling with his socks. Hotch gets down to help him straighten them. "You're doing a really good job, Jack. And I'm really sorry for shouting at you before."

"It's okay, Daddy."

His chest aches. "Well, you know I wasn't really angry at you, I was upset about some things that are happening at work. But I shouldn't have shouted at you, so I'm going to have a time-out while Dave takes you to Little League, and I'll catch up with you there, okay?"

Jack accepts that, only insisting on a hug first. (He obeys, though it worries him he can't tell whether Jack's trying to reassure himself or Hotch.) Dave's eyes hold more questions, but Hotch evades them with a brief, "I won't be long. You know the alarm code," and makes his escape.

*

He figures if Reid doesn't answer he can at least wear himself out running laps around the local park. But Reid does, and lets him in, only saying, "I thought you were coming on Wednesday."

Hotch shakes his head. "Wednesday?"

"After the case. You said—" He stops, twelve words later than he really could have. "It doesn't matter. Hit me."

Hotch is happy to oblige. (Less happy about rewarding his outburst with violence; about using Reid like this; about the secrets and lies and this decision he has to make—) He punches him hard enough to make him step backwards, and hard enough to make him stumble. A third punch knocks him back against a table piled with open books, and a fourth— Reid desperately dodges and his fist hits hard wood instead.

He grabs Reid's shirt ready to make up for that miss, but Reid gasps, "Wait— Stop."

He lets go in frustration. "What, because I grazed myself a bit?"

"No, because I _told_ you to _stop_ ," Reid shoots back. "And you're going to put an icepack on it because I'm _telling_ you to."

He rolls his eyes but goes to the freezer as ordered. The knuckles do hurt: flexing his fingers flares pain, but everything works fine. There isn't even any blood, just some scraped skin and an incipient bruise. He wraps a clean dishrag around the icepack and presses it to the back of his hand on the way back to Reid. "Now what?"

"Uh, now you, um, sit down."

He looks expressively around the room. Every surface imaginable is covered with books: places in them marked with bookmarks, or notepads full of scribblings, or thinner books. Even for Reid it's shambolic. The only seat free is half of the sofa, and Reid's standing directly in front of that.

"There's— There's the floor," Reid suggests uncertainly.

Hotch looks at him. No, it's not a suggestion, despite the high note in his voice. Hotch says drily, "It's been a while since I folded my legs and crossed my arms."

"You can kneel. I've s-seen it." His breath hitches under Hotch's gaze, and nervously he licks his lips. But he doesn't back down. "Kneel on the rug."

It's barely half a step behind Hotch. Deliberately he takes that half step back — no more — and lowers himself without taking his eyes off Reid's. One knee, then two, on the very edge of the rug. He sits back on the heels of his sneakers and silently challenges him: _Now what?_

Reid takes half a step forward. He licks his lips again: his ears are pink and his pupils black. Hotch can only assume, from the warmth of his own face and the way the room seems a lot less dim than when he arrived, that so are his. He doesn't look down at Reid's crotch, but... it's right there in his peripheral vision. He's just not sure if Reid's going to actually say— He's even less sure of what he'll answer.

The silence stretches tight between them. Finally Reid swallows. "Stay there until your knuckles are numb," he says in a croak, and retreats to the sofa and his books.

Hotch's eyes shut and he lets out a long, unsteady breath. He focuses on the ice: he's already starting to feel the burn of it. _Cold, burn, ache, numb._ He knows the rule for icing an injury, he's just usually too impatient to follow through with it. But now his breathing slows and his shoulders relax and he settles in to wait it out.

(Shifting his weight every now and then from one leg to another. He feels like Reid isn't going to let him count it if his feet go to sleep before his knuckles do.)

Reid isn't reading the books so much as apportioning them among piles around the room. The clutter isn't absentmindedness: he's laying them out like a room-sized photoboard, getting it all out of his busy mind into a form he can survey from one step removed. Hotch imagines himself doing the same with his own tangle of thoughts. Prentiss's faked death there on the footstool; on the table next to it these visits with Reid (which were, after all, going on long before she left). Strauss there to one side, to deal with, but later, and Mom through that door well inside a room he never enters. JJ there under a lamp; there along another table the rest of the team (because he still thinks of her as part of the team): Dave, Morgan, Garcia, Seaver, Reid again. And here on the chessboard beside him Jack — and behind him Jessica.

It doesn't give him the answer he wants. But it does make it clear the questions he needs to ask.

And the cold ache is dulling. He lifts the icepack and flexes his hand again experimentally: it's stiff and numb and, ice or no, is definitely going to turn a stunning range of colours.

"You could take a sick day," Reid suggests from the second-to-last book in his stack: he looks amused. "Or three."

"The problem is I'm meant to meet Dave at Jack's Little League game now." But that, like this decision, just has to be faced up to. He checks as he stands up, "Did you want me to kick you around a bit before I go?"

"No, I'm good," Reid says comfortably, and waves off the icepack Hotch offers him too. For once apparently he's got the better end of the deal.

*

"How are they doing?" he asks when he joins Dave on the sidelines of what is probably meant to be warm-up exercises. (After a few months of 'training', Jack's Little League team is still less a team and more a herd of small children running around a field and tripping over the ball each in their own excitement.)

He needn't have bothered acting casual. Dave takes one look at him, downright relaxed where half an hour ago he was reduced to fleeing his own apartment, and lifts his eyebrows expressively. "That's one hell of a time-out," he says — and then he notices Hotch's hand too.

"Don't worry," Hotch says drily, "the table won't press charges."

"Uh huh." He eyes him and tacks about. "Well, you're going to set a good example and get some ice off Claire for it, right?"

"Already iced it."

Dave's eyebrows aren't coming down any time soon. "Voluntarily?"

"Mm," he says ambiguously, and calls to a boy hogging the ball, "Good dribbling, Tony, but let's practise passing the ball now. Can you kick it to Cassie?"

Dave huffs, but he takes the sport too seriously to argue. They're well into the game before he snatches a chance to say, "You know I didn't mean to pressure you about JJ."

"Sure you did," Hotch says dismissively. "The thing is I can get her back if I take an assignment overseas for a few months—"

"What? The hell kind of deal is that?"

"Well, I need to talk about it with Jessica, and if they don't agree to _my_ conditions then it's not happening, but I'll try and let the team know either way on Monday."

Dave snorts, glancing pointedly at his hand. "They're not going to be distracted that easily."

Well, when he puts it like that....

*

There are a lot of phone calls through the weekend, and meetings on Monday morning. When he finally gets into the BAU, Dave's rounded the team up for him in the conference room. He can hear the murmur of speculation as he approaches, and when he steps in he's the instant focus of all attention.

A moment later his bruise is. "What happened to your hand?" Reid asks curiously, because of course he does.

"I knocked it on a table," Hotch says, and sits down as even more curious glances are exchanged. "I know you've all been wanting to know what's going to happen with the team." And he lays it out methodically: Seaver to transfer; Reid to take his sabbatical; himself to take temporary duty— There's a ripple of dismay here. "I do have some good news," he says (and strategically rearranges his hands, right covering bruised left): "I talked with Strauss and she's convinced the Pentagon to let JJ come back to fill the vacant profiler position."

In the general delight that follows, his hand is _almost_ forgotten. Not quite. Morgan casts a shrewd look at his half-hidden bruise and asks, "So when you talked to Strauss... was there a table involved?"

He carefully rearranges his hands back to their normal clasped position. "Are there any questions about these changes?"

Reid doesn't hide his smirk very well, but no-one's looking at Reid. And they do have questions, and when those are done... Morgan's speculation is as plausible as anything. No-one wants to make Hotch admit it if it's true — or to be disappointed if it's not.

Except for Dave. He waits until everyone else has left the room, then says, "I'm not buying it."

"What's that?" Hotch asks disingenuously.

" _Maybe_ you had time to meet Strauss on Saturday morning. But I do _not_ buy her giving you any ice for it."

That is pretty unlikely. Hotch admits, "You know, I've never been convinced that ice is actually that effective."

(Dave's response to this isn't what you'd call appropriate to the workplace.)


	17. Chapter 17

Three months in Pakistan without his son, his team, or even someone to beat up when his head starts going around in circles is more than enough time to compensate the Pentagon for an agent they had no right to in the first place. 

The problem is he's never really dealt with Haley's murder. Her death, yes: he's accepted that, or at least the harsh and inescapable fact of it and all its consequences. But a year and a half cycling between focusing on Jack and focusing on his team, with no time for anything else (except the occasional cathartic encounter with Reid that ultimately acts as little more than a pressure valve) have kept him from thinking too hard about how it happened.

So now, stuck in the desert with a team and an investigation he really isn't attached to, the thoughts come. And reassuring himself that at least he's done right by JJ — at least _she's_ back — only raises the questions.

Because if he could bring JJ back from the _Pentagon's_ clutches, then how — how could he not do _something_ to save Haley from a single textbook-case psychopath? Couldn't he have negotiated better, or got there faster — commandeered a car — realised sooner—? Or couldn't he have made sure WitSec prepared her better? Couldn't he have gone with her into witness protection, and let the team handle Foyet without him?

 _You always need to be the hero,_ she told him when she found him packing for Milwaukee. He should have listened to her. He should—

Would it really have been so terrible if he _had_ just made the goddamned deal?

*

Going home and seeing Prentiss return safely is another bittersweet victory. (And seeing the shock and grief on her face as she watches Doyle die is a profoundly discomfitting image.) But he has to catch up on three months away from Jack, and to prepare for a senate committee hearing that will determine the team's future, so it's easy to bury himself back in those and let himself not think too hard about anything else.

*

He slips out while the team is still celebrating the lifting of their suspensions and Prentiss's return to the team, and tracks Strauss down at her desk. She looks up from a file and asks, "Changed your mind about picking up those cases now?"

It certainly is the stack she promised. It's just not why he came. "I wondered what _you_ told the committee," he says. Prentiss can be persuasive, but he doesn't think they reinstated the team just because she recited the FBI oath of office at them.

Strauss's eyes flick away, as if embarrassed to be caught out helping. "Maybe I told them I stand by my agents."

He has to restrain a grimace, remembering that argument. "I don't think it would have been that simple," he admits. Whether it was or not, she gives no clue now. "In any case, I appreciate all your support for the team. And if you want to take the rest of that time off—"

"I'll be fine," she cuts in with a touch of defensiveness.

He nods. "Well, any time," he says, and gathers up the stack of cases.

He's halfway to the door when she says, "Aaron." He turns; she's taken her reading glasses off. "I really am fine."

"You look well," he agrees. A wariness shutters over that brief glimpse of vulnerability, and he _knows_ how addiction can twist the most innocent thing into a reason— He comes up with, "But maybe that's just because you've had three months without me."

She snorts and lets him leave her to her work this time.

He meant to dump the cases in his office and rejoin the team, but on the way he passes Reid, forehead creased in a deep frown, hurrying to the elevator. Reid has spent the same three months without catharsis, he thinks, and on top of that has been confronted with Prentiss back from the dead. "Reid—"

"I've got a headache so I'll see you tomorrow," Reid says without looking back at him.

And Hotch doesn't say anything else, because this is what happens when your lies catch up with you.

*

Over the next several days it becomes clear that, despite everything, Reid isn't actually angry at him. He shuns any personal conversation like the plague, but it's JJ who bears the brunt of his considerable resentment. (When Hotch confronts him he says, "I didn't come to your house crying for ten weeks," which— But then he's out of the room again.)

At least he comes to dinner at Dave's and, what's more, makes an effort at a few stilted exchanges with her. It's a start, even if as soon as Hotch signals his departure he takes the opportunity of escape by asking for a lift home.

And after all, even if he doesn't say anything for the first half of the ride, that's progress too.

"Reid," Hotch says at last, "you didn't come and cry at my house, but you did let me beat you up on a weekly basis."

"You didn't do it to take advantage," Reid says.

"But I did do it, and you have every right to be mad about that."

"But I'm not, Hotch, I—" He scrubs at his face. "I just keep wishing she'd never come back."

They're nearing the crux of it, Hotch feels, and takes his time responding. "You were starting to make peace with her death, and her return stirred everything up again. It's natural for a part of you to wish for things to go back to a place you worked so hard to get to."

Reid grimaces, in dissatisfaction rather than disagreement. He looks out the window for the rest of the ride, and when Hotch pulls up outside his apartment building he doesn't get out.

After a long wait, Hotch asks, "Did you want me to come up?"

"No," he says quickly. "...Maybe."

Hotch resumes waiting.

It takes him a while to work up to it, but when he gets there it's with a rushed, "I'd like to try hitting you. I'm not mad at you, I just don't want you to hit me tonight, but I know I can't keep taking it out on JJ — and I know this isn't what you meant when—"

"Reid," Hotch says. "Okay."


	18. Chapter 18

Reid is awkward and uncertain face-to-face with him. "Um," he says while Hotch waits for him to work up to the first blow, "same rules?"

"Mutatis mutandis," Hotch agrees. Fair's fair. He waits some more as Reid chews his lip, then suggests, "I could provoke you."

"I'm not mad at you," Reid says again.

"I know, but... given you've hardly let JJ speak to you I'm guessing she hasn't told you she was the one who offered to break the news to the team. She knew if she cried you'd be more likely to believe—"

A fist flies; he catches it.

"Hotch!" Reid complains.

He quirks his eyebrows sheepishly as he lets go. "Force of habit."

"Maybe you should, um, turn around."

"Um," he retorts, "make me."

Reid hesitates still, but he's determined now. He takes Hotch by the arm and turns him; Hotch could resist if he tried, but it's progress.

And it's disconcerting to stand with his back to danger, even if that danger is only Reid. When the punch lands — not enough to knock his balance, but not a fly-swat either — he has to forcibly keep himself from turning back. "Follow-through," he reminds him.

The next drives him a step forwards. He shifts back again as soon, and casts about for a reflection somewhere to watch. But when he sees movement in a framed picture on the wall he feels his skin crawl. He shuts his eyes and _makes_ himself stand there for it. He swallows the pain, and stands firm, and listens: the unsteady breathing, the soft brush of clothes in motion, the floorboards shifting under a shifting weight when he already knows it's coming like he knows the back of Dad's hand.

It hits like it wants to get through his ribs. Reid's getting the swing of it, he thinks, and considers unclamping his throat to say so. But another follows almost at once, because goddamned Reid likes his goddamned games. So he focuses on his balance instead, and on keeping Reid from the satisfaction of his hitched breathing. Like Reid could even inflict a real beating if he wanted to. His next punch might make Hotch's eyes open to check he's still at a safe distance from any of the tables cluttering the room, but he can't make Hotch turn around, or—

Another blow rattles his teeth, and he clenches his jaw. It'll take more than a few taps to make him cry uncle. He's taken worse than this has any chance of being; hell, _Reid's_ taken plenty worse. And Hotch doesn't know where this nerves-jangling resentment has come from when Reid has every right to turn the tables for once. The least he deserves is for Hotch to take what he's been dishing out for three years.

So when a blow knocks him forward he rocks back for the next; when that drives a hard lump in his chest he breathes through it; when the pain flares he bears it, and when the suspense between blows pulls at him to turn—

(There was a painting in Dad's study too, behind the desk. Probably Mom chose it: it matched the curtains. When he was younger he used to imagine swinging over the river on the willow's branches. Later, he imagined cutting an old-fashioned switch like he'd read about in books, and turning, and—

(Turning never actually worked like that in real life. Not even thirty years later with a glass in his hand. It wouldn't now, either. As badly as he wants to turn, as badly as his shoulders ache with the need to hit back, that's just not what he's here for tonight.)

—He fixes a glare on the reflection in the painting's glass and stays put through the next punch, and the next.

And abruptly it stops. He doesn't let his guard down. If anything the stillness leaves him off-balance and faintly nauseous, roiling with emotion too dangerous to examine.

"This isn't helping," Reid says.

Hotch pulls together what shreds he can of composure, feeling as if he's only about half present. He turns at last (it hurts) and says blandly, "You're probably missing the endorphins."

Reid blinks. "W-what?"

With a shake of his head (doing that hurts too) he says, "You know what endorphins are, Reid."

Reid's mouth hangs half-open as if he's shocked that Hotch too knows that the word is a portmanteau for _endogenous morphine_ : a morphine-like substance created within the body. "They're—" He swallows, as wide-eyed as if Hotch had just sucker-punched him. "Endorphins are neuropeptides produced by the central nervous system and the p-pituitary gland, primarily as a response to pain, but they're also known to be stimulated by other activities such as aerobic exercise or even laughter. They serve as ligands to— to a group of G protein-coupled receptors, and by binding to these receptors they inhibit the transmission of pain signals, so essentially they function as a highly potent and— and c-completely natural analgesic."

Hotch listens patiently, though he can hardly help it that his eyebrows lift every time Reid avoids saying _opioid_. He lets the question go, though, and instead suggests, "Or perhaps hitting me isn't helping because you're not really angry at me."

"I-I already said—"

"You're not even really angry at JJ. After all, she may have lied to you for a few months, but that was to save Emily's life. You've been lying to her for years just to score a cheap endorphin high."

Reids mouth clacks shut: a rare sight.

"This was never going to work," he concludes. "You'd have known that if you'd have stopped to think about it. So I suggest you take some time now to really think about what you want here, and let me know when you've figured it out."

He walks out of the apartment while Reid's still swallowing. He's closing the door behind himself (and yes, it even hurts to lift his hand to the door knob) before Reid even thinks to call after him, "Hotch—"

The door shuts. Alone, he indulges in a juddering breath in. Reid doesn't call after him a second time, and he gets a grip on himself and makes his way back down to his car.

*

Next morning he gets to work early, meaning to hole up in his office for the day, and discovers Reid already working with intent at his own desk, for no possible other reason than to catch him alone. He keeps his irritation to himself and sets to walking past him, just like he does every day, with an unassailably everyday, "Good morning."

Reid glances up to answer, "Good morning," then carries on with his work just like he does every day.

But if this were any other day he wouldn't be here this early. Hotch shuts his eyes for a moment, then turns at the foot of the stairs. "I'm sorry about last night. I shouldn't have said those things."

Reid looks up again, lips lightly pursed in thought. "Why did you?"

 _They were true,_ he finds himself thinking, but has the sense not to say it. It's not an answer anyway. That... is an uncomfortable gap in an evening he's trying not to think too hard about. "It doesn't matter why I did it, the—"

"It matters to me," Reid puts in.

Reid doesn't _get_ to— Quickly he squelches that odd flare of... whatever. Instead he says, "Well, the fact is I don't know."

"Okay," he says easily, and then he says, "Let me know when you've figured it out."

Hotch stares at him disingenuously turning his pages. "Reid—"

"You're not sorry, you're angry. But the thing is, Hotch, I followed the rules. You're the one who didn't tell me to stop when it got too much."

"It wasn't—"

"So why are you angry?"

Because Reid's being a little shit. He doesn't say that, either, but he looks it. Then he turns his back and goes on up to his office like he planned to in the first place.

(He slept badly. _Everything_ hurts this morning.)

*

Their next UnSub is recently back home from a classified mission, even more recently injured, and no longer recognises his friends and family as his own.

It's not like this for Hotch. He was afraid three months in Pakistan would put a distance between him and Jack, but maybe the daily Skype calls helped, or maybe it's just in Jack's nature (and the warmth Haley instilled in him over the first four years of his life) that the moment he saw Hotch again he ran to him and leaped up into his arms.

And as Hotch hugged him back... maybe it was just that an almost-six-year-old is _heavy_ so Hotch really had to hold on, but for the first time it didn't feel like something he was just going through the motions of. It felt natural, like coming home. Everyone — Jack, Jessica, the team — is very much themselves, and (if you ignore what happened with Reid, which he does) he fits seamlessly back into their life. His life.

It's just when he looks in a mirror— But that's not it either. It's been years since he's really examined his reflection except to check there's nothing in his teeth, because on the one hand he takes after Dad and on the other hand the scars Foyet left are never going to quite disappear. (At least they're a pale sheen now, instead of the old purple.) But he knows what he looks like and he still looks like himself. There's no disconnect there.

No: the thing he can't quite get a handle on is that when he looks in the mirror (or the glass of a painting, or a pot he's drying) — when he looks past himself, over his reflection's shoulder — there's nothing there behind him.

Of course there's nothing behind him. He knows that. He never thought there was.

It just shakes him afresh every time he sees it.

*

It shakes him too to find out Jack's classmate (dealing with his own parents' divorce) has been teasing him about not having a mother; and that Jack hasn't said a word to Hotch in case it makes him sad. Instead he's determined to make friends with his bully. He's putting everyone's needs ahead of his own and doesn't even know he's doing it. How would he? He's not even six years old: it takes time to learn to recognise and verbalise what your needs are.

Always so much easier to recognise your son's.

But right now it's Jack's needs he has to focus on. At least he knows he's using it to avoid thinking about what happened with Reid. That makes a difference, right?


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Sorry for the delay! I got sick and then I was on holiday and I literally lost track of what day of the week it was... In good news, there's an extra two chapters on the way. I've been waffling back and forth whether they belong at the end of this one or the start of the next and finally decided on this one.)

He makes himself go to the funeral for Dave's ex-wife. He's coming to hate funerals and their platitudes. But he doesn't know what else to say either, when the person who's gone wasn't even part of your life any more, and yet now they're cut from it more cruelly than any knife could do — and he would know, on both counts, and has to hold very tight to a very steady breath—

So he's grateful that Prentiss takes Dave out for drinks after his first case back and neither of them seem to expect Hotch's company. It means he can wallow in his hotel room, using paperwork and the howl of the storm to drown out thoughts of Haley.

Until Reid knocks, and greets Hotch's answering it with, "The juxtaposition of these two cases is interesting, don't you think?"

Hotch cocks his head. Most people knocking on their boss's hotel door at nine thirty at night after a long case would start with 'Am I disturbing you?' or at least 'Hi,' but of course this is Reid. He lets him in and closes the door as he asks, "How so?"

"The first UnSub was obsessively inducing near-death experiences in his victims, while this one was attempting to bring his brother back to life by creating a literal Frankenstein's monster. In two very different ways they were both challenging the boundary between life and death. It's especially apposite given that the team's recently experienced Emily effectively coming back from the dead."

Hotch watches him scan the room, mapping the furniture, trip hazards, and breakables. Apparently he's got tired of waiting for Hotch to figure things out. Granted it has been — hell, nearly two months. "Reid, we agreed not to do this on a case."

"We finished the case," he points out. "Now we're just stuck here until the storm dies down."

"We still represent the Bureau."

Reid says smugly, "Someone should probably tell that to Emily and Rossi before they order their fourth round."

Dave deserves a few drinks right now. But letting them take the night off makes it hard to maintain Hotch can't, and knowing their rooms on either side of his are empty makes it hard to argue he and Reid can't risk the noise. (Here a particularly strong gust rattles the window as if to say they're not likely to be louder than _that_.) He sets his jaw all the same and says, "I'm not beating you up in a hotel room."

"Why not?"

He really should be able to think of a decent reason. Or ten. Instead he resorts to a firm, "Reid, I've got a stack of paperwork to get through, so unless you've got something to add to my report..." He gestures invitingly to the door.

Reid picks an armchair and makes himself comfortable in it. "I was reading _The Pirates of Penzance_ the other day."

Hotch has to forcibly stifle the urge to yank him up and manhandle him back out to the corridor. (It's not like he _owns_ the comic opera.) Reid gazes up at him, lips parted, swallowing heavily. (It just evokes the day he first saw Haley, and the day he buried her, and Reid is bringing it up specifically to elicit the predictable emotional response.) It's a classic fork: whether Hotch hauls him up now or lets him sit there to provoke him, Reid wins.

So Hotch tips the board over. He scoops up his go-bag from beside the bed and takes it to the bathroom.

He gets through a brisk shower, and a close shave. He does want to beat Reid up again, he admits, toweling his hair off. (Something kicks in his groin, as if to say _No kidding_. He ignores it.) He's just been avoiding the fact, because first he's going to have to face up to... everything Reid's going to want to talk about.

He brushes and flosses, and he sets his jaw at himself in the mirror. When they get home he's not going to wait for a chance to visit Reid. He's going to make one, and deal with all of this once and for all. For now he pulls on tomorrow's clothes, because he does have a stack of paperwork and if he tries to go to bed now he'll just spend half the night with everything buzzing around in his head.

When he steps back out, Reid says from the same armchair, "I think Frederic wanted to be a pirate."

His groin kicks again, even as his chest tightens in anger. He knows what Reid's doing, and still finds himself playing into it by arguing, "It's theatre. You can't just read a script and—"

"I know the traditional interpretation is to take him at his word that he abhors their 'infamous calling', but I think if we look at his behaviour we can see that simply can't be true."

"He explains his reasons for staying with them. He felt duty-bound to honour the contract—"

"If he was really motivated by duty he'd recognise that he had a prior duty to the law that can't be contracted out of."

Hotch grits his teeth and makes himself think. "He was eight years old when he was apprenticed to the pirates, twenty-one when the contract expires. That's more than long enough for his values to be coloured by their attitudes, especially since he's grown fond of them—"

Stubbornly Reid says, "He hasn't just been influenced by their attitudes, he's improved on them. He's the one arguing for them to be _more_ ruthless—"

"He told them that under duress!"

" _He_ brought it up, because he _wants_ to be a pirate and this is his last opportunity to participate in their enterprise. Hotch, think about it: if he didn't _want_ to be a pirate he could have left at any time and cited his duty to follow the law. The fact that he didn't proves that he wanted to stay. He enjoyed piracy, even though he knew it was wrong, and the only way he had to justify the contradiction to himself was to say he's a 'slave of duty'; the hyperbole alone is a clue that he's overcompensating. By the time the contract expired he was committed to that view of himself, so he had to renounce his own desire to stay — but as soon as the pirate king found even the slimmest of loopholes he leaped at the opportunity to rejoin his comrades."

"So you contend he was lying to the woman he loved when—"

"He was lying to himself," Reid contradicts, craning his face up at him, throat stretched tight and eyes dark and searching. "And he didn't really love her: he just thought he needed a wife to fit into honest society and she was the first person to agree."

It's the first thing he's said based on actual textual evidence, rather than merely the lack thereof, and it tips Hotch over the edge from exasperation to barely-contained fury. "He loved her." It comes out too thick with emotion to pretend they're still talking about Penzance. "And I'm not lying to myself. We both know what I want, and we both know it's nothing to do with duty."

It should make Reid show his hand, whether he means to provoke Hotch into that violence after all, or to just hold him on the brink of it like his last attempt at book club. Except for a moment, as Hotch says _nothing to do with duty_ , it also makes him remember letting Reid hit him because he _owed him that much_.

That's different, he tells himself firmly, but not before Reid thoughtfully purses his lips. And _that_ feels on his back like a starched shirt on fresh welts. Hot resentment wells afresh in his chest and with a quick step forward he hauls Reid up by the collar. "Enough foreplay."

"Wait," Reid blurts, even as he scrambles for balance and barely misses knocking a lamp over. "I really think we should talk about this first."

Hotch wants nothing less. His pulse is in his ears and the only thing holding his fist back is that infuriating word _Wait_. "I don't."

Reid bites his lip unhappily: he's breathing shallowly too and his eyes are wide and black, but he says, "Th-then I—"

A knock at the door interrupts him mid-rejection. Hotch mentally curses on multiple levels even as he lets go of Reid and turns to answer it.

"Hotch, you can't," Reid whispers desperately: "your eyes—"

And whose fault is that? he thinks savagely as he pauses to stare into the nearest light for a couple of seconds to counteract the dilation. It's not the only part of him displaying his arousal, but when he opens the door it's JJ and she's not looking at his pants.

"Can you call Reid?" she asks without preamble. "He's not answering his phone or his door and I don't know if it's just me or—"

"He's here," Hotch says. Calmly, despite the new flare of anger at seeing her forehead creased in worry and knowing who caused it. He looks over his shoulder.

Reid's retreated into the space hidden behind the bathroom, but emerges at this, and if he looks guilty so he should. "We were just talking about Gilbert and Sullivan," he explains, which is not suspicious at all, but JJ is too relieved and embarrassed by her own worry to notice.

"Not Frankenstein?" she quips by way of cover.

"You'd think," Hotch says blandly.

She laughs, and bids them goodnight, and he closes the door again. Calmly, despite his head roiling in rage: rage at the lies by implication; rage at Reid for making them necessary; rage at himself for letting him.

So when Reid ducks past him and reaches for the door handle, he catches his wrist. "Don't be stupid," he says conversationally, and when Reid looks at him in startlement he pulls the arm smoothly up behind his back to press him against the wall. "We're having a quiet talk, remember?"

_Quietly_ Reid stutters, "D-don't twist my arm, we agreed—"

"That's the problem when you start changing the rules."

"Hotch, stop."

"No, Reid. You need to remember that when we're on a work trip, I'm in charge, and you keep your phone with you at all times."

"Hotch—"

He shifts Reid's arm a little higher and for good measure grinds his hard-on against Reid's hip. Under his chest and their wrists he feels Reid's breathing hitch. "I'm in charge. You keep your phone with you. Say it."

"Y-you're in charge, I keep my phone with me at all times."

"Now you're going to _walk_ back to your room, you're going to go to bed, and if you get the urge to do something like this again you're going to remember you've got a brain and use it. Understood?"

"Yessir."

He lets go and steps back. Reid bolts at once for the door — but before turning the handle he pauses, and gulps a breath, and gets a hold of himself long enough to step out calmly.

Hotch meanwhile doesn't feel like he's got a hold of himself at all.


	20. Chapter 20

He's lost track of how much he's screwed up. He's not quite sure where it went wrong and he definitely doesn't know how to fix it, or even if it can be fixed. At this point he has serious doubts.

So when he's waiting for the rest of the team next morning, hoping the fresh post-storm air outside the hotel will make him look better rested than he is, the last thing he expects is for Reid to come up from behind him and say, "Logically we've got three options: we can carry on crossing each other's boundaries, we can talk about it, or we can... stop."

Hotch looks sideways at him, and away when even that proves too discomfitting. "After what I did last night don't you think that'd be for the best?"

"Maybe, but I'd like to confirm that for myself, so I'm going to come to your place after Jack's asleep to talk."

"Reid—" But as he turns to him he spots Prentiss coming out wearing sunglasses and looking like it's too early in the week to be out of bed at that.

Even as Reid waves to Prentiss, he murmurs a quick, "If you'd rather just stop you don't need to let me in."

*

He lets him in. ( _He owes him that much._ )

Reid hovers there until Hotch waves him to the sofa. Then he sits down and waits as Hotch decides taking the seat next to him is mildly better than looming over him.

Jack's sleeping soundly. The apartment is silent. Reid's clearly letting him take the lead on this; Hotch wishes he wouldn't, even though he realises why he's doing it. At least there's only one place he can start. "You asked why I said those things two months ago, and I think it's because I wanted to hit back, I couldn't do that physically, so I used words instead."

"But you didn't tell me to stop."

He studies his thumbnails. _Same rules,_ Reid had said, and Hotch had answered, _Mutatis mutandis_ : Reid was meant to hit him, and he was meant to control it. To stop it. Instead he just stood there, stoically bearing it until Reid gave up of his own accord. Now he says (distancing himself from it, he thinks distantly), "Say you're being bullied at school and you ask them to stop. What happens?"

"They laugh at you and keep going," Reid says promptly. (Hotch doesn't remember his father laughing. A deeper rage, at best; more often scorn and vicious bile. But either way he kept going. Bullies always do.) "Is that what you thought I'd do?"

Something in his chest tightens painfully as he makes himself focus on giving that the honest answer it deserves. "I didn't think about what you'd do one way or the other. I just didn't consider telling you to stop."

Reid nods and is silent, more in thought than from any expectation of Hotch saying more. Eventually he asks, "Before that, when I said I wanted to try hitting you — did you consider it then?"

"I wanted to try it, so no."

 _Why?_ he expects, followed by questions probing into whether it was really wanting to try it when what he _wanted_ was to help Reid; to offer some kind of self-flagellatory penance for how he'd treated him over Prentiss. Instead Reid seems to accept that answer too and asks instead, "What about when you were kneeling on my rug. Would you have agreed to... uh..." He shifts awkwardly and glances over his shoulder as if to check Jack isn't listening in.

Hotch sits carefully still, ignoring his groin as he ignored Reid's at the time. "It doesn't matter. You didn't ask."

"If I would've."

"You wouldn't have," he reasons, so much more comfortable analysing Reid's motives than his own, "because if I'd refused you'd have lost the control you had over me, but if I'd agreed... that would have been just a little too scary."

"I wasn't scared," Reid says petulantly.

Mildly Hotch points out, "You almost had a panic attack when I just pulled your pants down a few inches to spank you."

"Those were completely different circumstances and I still wasn't scared, I just had a-a physiological reaction to a situation my subconscious perceived as threatening—" because of course Reid argues _he_ wasn't scared, his _subconscious_ was — "but if you were kneeling in front of me that wouldn't be an issue." Hotch's appeasing gesture only makes him set his jaw more obstinately and turn, as far as he can on the sofa, to face him in a challenge. "Try it now if you don't believe me."

His pulse jumps. "Reid," he murmurs, so quietly it's nearly swallowed in the back of his throat, "I'm not giving you a blowjob while my son's sleeping in the next room over."

"Monday, then," Reid says at once. "Come by on the way home from work."

His mind whirls as he tries to figure out what's going on in Reid's head. Does he think he has something to prove, or does he actually want—? The easiest way to check is to call his bluff. "Have you actually got any condoms or do you want me to bring my own?"

For answer, Reid pulls a couple from his pocket and holds Hotch's gaze, waiting for him to make his move. His own pulse is clearly up, his cheeks flushed, his pupils... partially dilated. His lips are parted on shallow breathing, but not more than usual when arguing with Hotch.

"You're not scared," Hotch says. It's half concession, half accusation. "You're not sexually aroused, either."

"No," Reid agrees. "Are you?"

"Not especially." Tartly he adds, "We established that a few years ago." —So this makes no sense.

And even as he's working through that, Reid asks, "So did you consider saying no?"

The question's a blow to his gut. It was _right there_ — and more than that too. He doesn't know why, only that his tongue has cleaved to the roof of his mouth.

After a long silence Reid continues, "Or when I asked you to come back after the gun range and hit me without a safeword. Or the first time after you faked Emily's death. Or... two and a half years ago, when I asked you to shove me on the chair... you didn't want to. You didn't want to shove me on the sofa, either, and I-I think you didn't want to bastinado my feet and that's why you were still upset and angry the next time."

Each memory is another blow, each sharper than the last. Together the pattern of them feels like— He shakes his head, but the conclusion can't be so easily denied. He lifts his eyebrows and with an effort suggests, "Or when Foyet told me to relax and I... did."

Reid opens his mouth, then shuts it on a dissatisfied frown.

Hotch forces his face and voice alike to stay dispassionate. "We assumed that when you used the same words Foyet did, that was an inadvertent trigger. But thinking about it, isn't it equally possible that it was Foyet's use of the type of language you use that triggered the same state of mind induced here?"

"I guess it is possible," Reid says clinically. "I always just assumed it was the blood loss."

Hotch looks at him for a long moment. It feels absurdly like a weight being lifted. "You... mean that muscles require blood to work."

"Usually," Reid says, and the only reason he's not smirking is because he's so very serious too. "Besides, when I hit you two months ago your first instinct was to hit back, and you've never obeyed me if you thought it might put your family at risk or interfere with the job — so, Hotch, I know for a _fact_ that if there was anything else you could have done to stop Foyet or save Haley you would have done it."

Hotch stands abruptly at that, and walks to the kitchen. He doesn't cry, quite. It just takes several minutes, gripping the edge of the sink, to get his head around the fact that he has been blaming himself for that moment for two years. The idea that he doesn't have to—

Doesn't Haley deserve more than for him to just absolve himself of failing her when she most needed him?

—He can tell himself that Reid's right. It doesn't mean he really believes it.

He blinks the fog away and busies himself with pouring two glasses of juice. It's a transparent cover, but when he emerges Reid is frowning in thought at the coffee table. He accepts the juice and sips it while Hotch sits down again, but it's not clear whether he's registered it at all.

Finally Hotch says what needs to be said: "None of this excuses the fact that I assaulted you last night."

"I'm not making excuses, I'm—" He scrubs his face and stands up. "I need to _think_ ," he says, making for the door. He discovers the glass still in his hand when he tries to open it, but only sets it on the side-table, tries again and is gone.

It's for the best, Hotch thinks in his wake. Reid will think about it properly, he'll come to the obvious conclusion, and... Just _stopping_ is better than Hotch deserves, but Reid won't want anything else that would hurt the team. Wasn't Hotch relying on just that to keep him quiet in the hotel room?


	21. Chapter 21

On an impulse he registers for the February triathlon. After Foyet, he got just fit enough to qualify for the field as quickly as possible, and never took the time to really get in shape again. Three months of training should fix that, and hopefully also help deal with the intrusive thoughts of Reid's ribs and his own fist and the sounds produced by the two meeting.

He hasn't even sorted out his running route, let alone his schedule — and if he's going to be training regularly he needs more running clothes because goodness knows he's barely coping with Jack's laundry as it is — when Reid turns up in his office asking, "Is it okay if we talk sometime?"

Hotch blinks at that tentativeness. "Sure, but if it's just to say you want to stop, I already figured."

"It's to talk," Reid says — then adds, "Unless you _want_ to stop."

"How is this in any way about what I want?"

"Hotch, it's always been about what we want."

That simple statement does a lot of complicated things to his groin. He glances to one side long enough to squelch it and points out, "There've always been other considerations too."

Reid acknowledges that with a grimace and nod, and without any further argument leaves again.

*

The warm twisty feeling in his gut refuses to dissipate through the day, no matter how many other considerations he tries to focus on. Finally, towards five, he heads down to Reid's desk. "Coming?"

"What? Where?"

He lifts his eyebrows. "Gun range?" he says as if reminding him, and Reid finally catches on and scrambles for his holster.

"Getting forgetful in your old age?" Prentiss teases him. Hotch is at the wrong angle to see whether or not Reid pulls a face at her, but _something_ makes her smirk into the case file she's working through.

Reid waits until they're in the elevator to ask, "W-why the gun range?"

"Because we can have a private conversation but the range marshal keeps a good eye out so there's next to no chance of things getting out of hand."

"Oh," Reid says. He sounds almost disappointed. But it's too short of a ride down to ask why, and when they've got out of the building and away from anyone who might overhear them, he changes the subject to, "My original plan this morning was to ask you about a couple of... fictionalised cases."

Hotch looks sidewise at him. "Because we don't get enough real ones?"

"Partly because I thought it would be easier to be objective if you thought we were talking about other people, but actually mostly because I wanted to— to _make_ you see that a discrete instance of assault—"

"Two," Hotch says, because apparently Reid has forgotten having to fake stabbing Hotch and flee his apartment on crutches two years ago.

Reid concedes, "That two discrete instances of assault, both under provocation, in neither case inflicting severe or lasting harm, simply aren't as... noxious as a pattern of repeatedly manipulating someone to do things they're not comfortable with."

Something uncomfortable worms in his stomach. He shakes his head on it and points out dryly, "It's not your fault I don't know when to say no."

"It is if I know that and use it to make you do what I want."

And that brings up far too many feelings to quickly sort through. They're nearing the gun range, so he doesn't answer at once. He uses the space afforded by signing in and collecting safety gear and ammo to acknowledge to himself that the thought of Reid manipulating him in that context is almost as appealing (mitigating his guilt) as it is disconcerting (what else can he manipulated into?) But still, in the broader scheme of Reid's argument, it's _untrue_.

"You didn't know," he tells Reid in their bay as they don their eye protection. "You only started to suspect in my hotel room. You were still figuring it out the next night."

"That's when I figured out the pattern. But I always knew if you were hesitating I just needed to provoke you more. And— and if you were avoiding being in a position where I could provoke you, I just needed to ambush you in front of Rossi, or get into your hotel room and refuse to leave. And if that wasn't enough, I could—" He stops. When Hotch looks up from checking his magazine he swallows. "I could... m-mention Haley."

Hotch holds his gaze and slides the magazine back in place with a click. "And yet," he says as Reid swallows again, "I'm the one who twisted your arm behind your back and made you cry yourself to sleep like a little baby."

Before he can figure out how _that_ just came out of his mouth, Reid's jaw has set and he's shoving his ear muffs on. Reflexively Hotch follows suit and stands back. Reid squares up against the target, aims, and steadily fires every round in the cylinder. When he's done, he grabs a handful more rounds to reload with and tells Hotch, "I didn't cry myself to sleep and my arm's fine. How's yours?"

Hotch lifts his eyebrows at that challenge to _his_ marksmanship from _Reid_ of all people, but takes his place. It's only as he's lifting his gun that he realises how much tension he's carrying in his shoulders. He breathes it out and focuses on his sights. Six shots at Reid's pace: they land more tightly clustered, but still far from his best work. He focuses again, harder — stance, grip, sights, and nothing else in the room. He shoots at his own quicker pace this time, and the more natural speed improves his accuracy. When the magazine's empty he swaps in the spare from his pocket to keep shooting, until the last three rounds disappear through holes he's already made.

In the silence then his pulse pounds in his ears. More muffled, Reid admits, "I was scared. And I don't think I've ever seen you scared, but what I have seen is when something threatens you, you take it out. With bullets — or with words."

They're apparently playing chess again, and Hotch has just been thoroughly skewered. If he's going to get through this without a repeat of the hotel room, he's going to need a clearer view of the board — and/or he's going to have to start playing his own game. But to begin with he regroups and plays for time: "Well, that target's still got a bit of life left in it, and by my count you're twenty-eight behind."

"I'm using a revolver!"

"Your choice," he points out. But while he's picking up his ejected magazine he lifts his backup gun from his ankle holster and hands it over. By the time Reid's finished the requisite checks Hotch has reloaded one of the magazines for him, and then he can stand back and watch.

And try to figure out what's going on in both their heads.

They've talked before about Reid pushing him, and manipulating him, and coercing him — specifically, they've talked about Hotch liking it. But _within limits_ , he said at the time, and Reid (now fumbling his emergency reload) agreed: when Hotch let him in. The rule's always been to meet when _mutually agreeable_.

(He sets his third magazine at Reid's elbow and gets a scowl for thanks.)

So he can understand, intellectually, why Reid's disconcerted by realising that he's been flouting those rules. He's more disconcerted himself than he cares to admit at reviewing those visits and second-guessing his entire understanding of what happened: how much less in control of himself he was than he thought; how much more in control Reid apparently was. But it's not exactly breaking news that Reid can be a manipulative brat — any more than that Hotch can be a bully.

(Reid manages the reload more smoothly this time, though he still has to reacquire his target afterwards.)

And if this was just Reid getting some guilt off his chest so they can both move on with their lives, fine. But it's not just a confession and apology. It's not an apology at all. Reid's made it repeatedly clear he doesn't want to stop: not in response to Hotch's crossing of the lines, and not in response to his own. He wants to talk, and when Reid talks—

His last shot barely hits the tattered target, probably because after three magazines full of rounds without pause he's already lowering the gun from fatigue. He doesn't even bother grimacing at the sheet, only hands the gun back to Hotch and picks up the magazines. Together they reload in silence.

He is at least giving Hotch space to think, much good it's likely to do him. Thinking is what brought him here, against his better judgement.

"I'm sixteen ahead now," Reid says then, offering up the grip of his revolver.

There's seventeen rounds in his own sidearm; ten in his backup; six in the revolver. The arithmetic's pretty simple. He holsters his sidearm, sets his backup on the bench, and takes it. He also pulls up a fresh target so he can see where his shots land.

It's been a while since he practised with a revolver, so he takes a moment to weigh up its balance, and another after his first shot to adjust for the more concentrated recoil. The rest of the shots go well enough, and even better once he swaps it for his own gun. Afterwards they both take their ear muffs off, and Hotch reloads the revolver and passes it back. "So we're even," he says. "What now?"

Reid holds his eyes with an open gaze. "That depends on you."

"Because if I say to stop, you'll stop?"

He licks his lips. "Yes. I will."

Hotch eyes that reluctant determination. "But otherwise you want to keep going. Which I wouldn't agree to while I thought you were in danger from me, so you needed to persuade me that you were my match."

"I am your match," he says simply, because Reid is also an arrogant son-of-a-bitch. "The last time we were here together I came one step from blackmailing you and made you hit me without a safeword."

"I didn't go to your apartment because you blackmailed me."

"You came because you couldn't let me suspect Emily wasn't dead, and I didn't know that but I knew you didn't want to, I knew how to make you anyway, I knew it might make you feel worse and I _didn't care_. The time we were here together before that, you told me you don't need a gun to kill someone. Well, Hotch, you don't need your fists to hurt them, either."

His words are quick with passion; his chin is lifted in anticipation and his carotid visibly pulsing. So, quite likely, is Hotch's. He's being manipulated, not warned off. "And you want to hurt me."

"It's a _side-effect_. I didn't want you to hit me without a safeword, I wanted to _make_ you do it."

"You want control."

"I want to make you give up control," he corrects him. "I don't want a blowjob, I want to _make_ you give me one. I want to _make_ you fuck me." He shifts closer; Hotch's chin lifts in response. "I want to _make_ you tell me what you were really thinking about while I was hitting you, and who you were really angry at."

He breathes very carefully. "And you're saying all this, knowing it will make it harder for you to manipulate me, because to really be satisfied by _making_ me do those things it has to be a challenge. You don't want it to be easy, and you don't want it to be safe."

Reid's heavy swallow is answer enough.

He checks he hasn't miscounted the rounds he's been thumbing back into the magazine in his hand. He reloads the gun, crouches to reholster it at his ankle — Reid reflexively takes a step back because no, he doesn't actually _want_ a blowjob — and, marshalling his most dispassionate expression, stands again. "Well, that should help me make my decision. Thank you."

He sees the shot land, but doesn't linger over it. He's halfway out the door when Reid attempts, "You're not going to clean your guns?"

He can clean his guns at home when Jack's asleep. ...Among other things needing a good polish. But calmly he turns back and explains, "I told you I brought you here because it's a controlled environment. And when I've got someone in a controlled environment I don't need to take them out. I let them talk, and then... I let them sweat."

Reid's mouth clacks shut, and Hotch leaves.

(So maybe he's feeling a little threatened.)

(Truth is, this isn't helping him make his decision at all.)


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I've updated the tags due to adding two chapters to the line-up. If anyone really hates Beth you could always pretend that those chapters don't exist and just read this as the last chapter of the story - that's how I originally wrote it, after all!

Running keeps his mind off it for the length of time he's pounding the pavement wondering what happened to his lung capacity, and swimming while he's trying to remember what he ever knew of technique. Then he has to head back to work and Reid is right there and he wants—

It should be a no-brainer. He's twice assaulted Reid; Reid's admitted in turn to manipulating him with an almost complete lack of remorse. This isn't a foundation for a healthy arrangement going forward.

A case, and making sure Garcia is supported through its aftermath, keep his mind off it for another couple of days. But that hyperfocus too fades and he's back to the same dilemma that shouldn't be a dilemma.

He doesn't care as much as he should that Reid's been twisting him around his little finger. What he cares about is that he's assaulted Reid, twice. Even if they put all the past behind them, what guarantee does he have that he won't do it again? What guarantee that the consequences won't be worse next time? Reid wants to keep challenging himself, and you don't put an agent in the field when you know they're going to keep taking bad risks.

So he holds out. And he swims, and he runs, and he procrastinates on going to the storage facility to retrieve his bike from among the rest of his and Haley's things. He doesn't actually make a decision.

*

Their next case is at a military academy for the proverbial wayward youth. The Director's taking an interest in his alma mater and Strauss attaches herself to the investigation as some kind of de facto political officer, so Hotch plays to the team's strengths. He assigns Rossi and Prentiss to the mass suicide site in the woods, JJ to meet the families, and himself and Morgan to interview the students and faculty. (Morgan with Strauss. The last thing they need is for Hotch to cross swords with her here.) The chances of bullying being somehow implicated in all of this approach ninety-nine per cent, and you don't put an agent in a position where you've seen them take terrifying risks, so he has Reid set up base out of the way with Garcia.

But no plan survives contact with the enemy. Stepping on campus feels like stepping back twenty-odd years to his own boarding school, except there's nothing safe or nurturing here. Everyone he speaks to makes his hair stand on end one way or another. The place is rife with bullying: it's not just tolerated but institutionalised, encouraged by a superintendant who's set himself up as a father figure only to mercilessly abuse his charges. He claims to be making them stronger, more disciplined; making men, when really he's just breaking boys.

And for the cherry on top, Morgan catches Strauss actually drinking on the case, and figures out Hotch knew something, and...

He keeps himself together and the investigation on track. He calls the EAP, and gets them all home, and goes with Morgan to confront Strauss, and tries, in the ugliness of that scene, not to think too hard about how close he came himself—

Could still come. He leaves Morgan to get her to rehab, his head spinning like a thirteen-year-old in an industrial tumble-dryer. A place like that— The kinds of boys who get sent there— He knows how tight-knit and insular these cultures are, alum begetting alum — but how does _no-one notice_ for _thirty years_ —?

When he finds Reid working alone in the bullpen he realises he hasn't shouted at anyone all day.

He makes the effort not to now, either. (It wasn't Reid he needed to worry about after all.) "Good work on the case," he says instead.

Reid blinks up at him. "Thanks."

"You should go home," he adds with an expressive glance around the empty desks.

"I guess so." He hesitates; opens his mouth; shuts it again.

Hotch could ignore the unasked question. He could keep avoiding the whole topic. He could go and finish his report (for the Director, in Strauss's absence, who won't be happy his old classmate has been arrested rather than given a federal grant) — but to hell with that. To hell with everything. There's a reason he never made the decision to stop this for good. "Does tonight suit you?"

"Y-yes—"

"Good. I'll just be a few minutes behind you."

He heads straight up to his office before any qualms can forestall him. He's packing up when Reid appears silently in his doorway.

"What's wrong?" he asks, snide because of course everything about this is wrong. "Too easy?"

"Did you consider saying no?"

"Only for the last three weeks. Are we doing this?"

Reid steps into the office. Hotch eyes him warily, but he stops in front of the desk and sits down. "Three questions," he says, "written answers, the first two timed at three minutes each."

"Do I get a copy of the grading schedule?"

"The first question is 'What do you want?' First person, active voice, no negatives, no euphemisms."

Hotch has answered that question before, and has no patience for repeating himself now. "I don't know if you've noticed—"

"That through the whole case you never once unfolded your arms?" He glances at the wristwatch buckled over his sleeve. "Time starts now."

He unfolds his arms deliberately, sullen as a schoolboy. He takes paper and a smooth-writing pen, moves aside anything underneath that might take an impression, and sits to write.

I want to hit you. A lot. I want you to control it, for safety's sake, but I want that safety so I can punch you, kick you, throw you around the room. I want to fell you with one solid left hook, then haul you up by the collar and double you over my fist. I want to twist your arm behind your back until you _scream_. I wan

His pen grinds to a halt halfway through a _t_.

Watching him, Reid says, "Write it."

The shredder is right by his desk. Reid won't stop him if he uses it right now. He suspects Reid wouldn't stop him if he...

He crosses the _t_ : to close the blinds and lock the door and toss the chair aside when you scramble to put it between us. I want to use you like a duster to clear my desk of all these reports of abuse and brutality. I want you to struggle so I have to use more force to subdue you: I want to thrash you with your own belt, first tearing your clothes out of the way so I can see the welts and bruises as they form. I want to slam the drawers shut on your hands and hear the bones shatter. And, when all the rage and despair has drained from me and lies pooled with your blood and tears and piss and shit, I want to leave it all behind me. I want to go home with a lightened soul and sleep without nightmares, and if someone tomorrow has a problem with it I want to step up in their face and tell them—

"Time's up," Reid says. "The second question is, 'What don't you want?'"

I don't want any of that.

Except for you to control it, and that too— I don't want to give up control and risk losing it for good. I don't want to be that mindless monster mashing my fist into— I want—

Reid shifts pointedly.

I don't particularly want you to be reading this. (Reid doesn't react to this in the slightest.) Or to be reading _me_. I have to— ( _Now_ Reid shifts again.)  Fine: I don't want members of my team speculating about my mental wellbeing, or worse, knowing— I ~~can't~~ don't want them to see how badly I've scr—

But the point is I don't want to hurt anyone like. that. Or at all. I don't want that cycle— I don't want. the monsters to win. ~~Too many~~ I don't want ~~to keep f~~ anyone else to suffer for my failings. I—

He jags a line across the page under that halting mess of disordered thoughts. It must be nearly three minutes by now. "What's the third question?"

"Twenty seconds," Reid says impassively.

I don't want to hurt

(He _was_ just repeating himself, but there his hand stops and won't be started again.)

"For the third question," Reid says, digging a much-folded page from a pocket, "read— read this and then shred them both."

He unfolds and smooths it warily while Reid shrinks back in his chair with an uncomfortable roll of his shoulders as if his shirt doesn't fit right. The page contains two scrawled mindmaps: Reid's run the same exercise on himself.

I want control of:

  * Hotch — to make him 
    * stop
    * start
    * admit
    * ~~fuck~~ do anything he would ~~n't~~ usually refuse
  * others — but ~~without~~ staying moral: 
    * justified - self-defence, defence of others
    * consented (and here a line circles back to Hotch, then zigzags in frustration to 'refuse'; a tighter hand notes "limits?" and "rules")
  * (and still in that same tighter writing) self 
    * pain
    * cravings
    * fear 
      * keep thinking
      * be ready for next time
      * prove (more lines here: one an arrow back to "others", annotated with "make them see"; another a sketchier bracket with "moral", which is more opaque: no-one's ever doubted Reid's morality)



Without looking up Hotch asks, "Can I ask for clarification on something?"

"No," Reid says, which is no surprise. A bracket, not an arrow: it implies a relationship of similarity, not causality. If "prove" is short for "prove competence", as the context implies, then Reid might have been thinking of the classic three needs: to feel competent, to feel like a good person — to feel loved or valued. He hasn't written that last down, maybe because he ran out of time, or maybe because that's not what he wants from this.

I don't want:

  * to be ~~scared~~ ~~a coward~~ weak.
  * ~~pain~~ don't actively want: 
    * pain
    * ~~to hurt Hotch~~
    * sex
    * to take risks
  * actively don't want: 
    * to panic
    * for Hotch to just give in
    * to hurt Hotch
    * or JJ or the team
    * to mess up a case because I can't focus
    * to stop



Hotch may not have an eidetic memory but he isn't afraid he'll forget any of that any time soon. It turns in his head, but the circles are quieter than before: less desperate, more contemplative. He feeds the two pages, Reid's and his own, into the shredder, and looks back when it's done. Reid is watching and waiting as if he might have changed his mind, so he asks, "What's the question?"

With a quick breath, Reid says, "Pair work, no time limit: 'What rules do we need?' And, um, I'm kind of hungry, so maybe pizza?"

*

At a table in a place they're fairly sure no-one they know frequents, they sit with pizza and paper: one to propose a rule, the other to write it down. Reid's first rule is more well-intentioned than robust, but after some discussion it turns in Hotch's hand into:

Either party may unilaterally introduce or amend any rule tending to decrease risk, at any time and with immediate effect. Should one party wish to introduce or amend any rule tending to increase risk, it must be submitted with one week's notice and will not take effect until agreed to. In the event of disagreement or uncertainty over whether the change constitutes an increase or decrease of risk, there will be no further activity until both parties are in agreement.

"This could take longer than I thought," Reid notes, making serious inroads on his second slice of pizza.

If this was a real legal document he'd spend at least another page on the question. Instead he passes pen and paper across the table and proposes in turn, "No rules-lawyering."

Reid scowls as if this targets him personally, which of course it does, but he writes it: No rules-lawyering.

Nothing happens during a case, work hours, or anywhere associated with work. Nothing affects the job or the team. Nothing affects family.

Meetings by mutual agreement only.

Hotch is trying to decide where this leaves them next time he spends a month or three with his head up his ass when Reid passes the paper and pen back. If either party says to wait or stop, the other complies immediately. Neither starts unless both have the capacity to say or otherwise signal it. Hotch writes this with some reluctance because he suspects Reid of having plans to create a situation where speech is insufficient — but, well. Not with _great_ reluctance.  If either wants to wait or stop, or suspects the other does, he's actively required to say so immediately.

He shakes his head as he writes this one. "But, Reid, this wouldn't have helped that night. I didn't know I wanted to stop — I... actively didn't want to concede defeat — and you didn't know either."

"But we do know now, and if it's an explicit rule you'll be more careful about following it."

"It's not enough."

Reid purses his lips briefly, then says, "Okay." Hotch waits for more, and shakes his head again in uncomprehension when it doesn't come, but Reid only picks up his cup to slurp at the dregs. "Get me a refill?" he says then.

Hotch looks at the plastic cup, and the set of his jaw, and is reminded of the morning in the hospital where Reid spilled his juice to make Hotch kneel and apologise and stop freaking out. It seems safest not to provoke him to a repeat in public. He takes the cup and as he goes to refill it makes himself think. Not that he's freaking out, he's just... maybe lost track of the question: _What rules do they need?_

He brings Reid's soda back to him and says, "Before... Foyet, you'd started staying for half an hour afterwards. It wouldn't stop anything going wrong, but it might give us a chance to repair it."

"Actually we probably don't even need that long: the half-life of adrenaline is just a couple of minutes." The impromptu literature review he launches into there gives Hotch a chance to catch up with him in slices of pizza. When he's also covered endorphins and serotonin they agree on: 15-minute cool-down period, 30 minutes on request of either party.

Any violation of these rules mandates a cease to all activities unless and until both parties agree that the violation has been satisfactorily dealt with.

By this time the paper, covered in both their writing and greasy fingerprints, is just a couple of eyelashes and a nosebleed away from being a first-rate Forensics 101 practical assessment. Both parties keep a copy of this somewhere safe completes the list, and when they've both eaten their fill of pizza and fries they track down a copy shop that's still open.

Outside again, each with their copy in a pocket, Reid tears the original into unnecessarily but reassuringly tiny squares. "Give me a few minutes' head-start to put my copy away?"

Hotch blinks. "Now?" Yes, he's been wanting this since he first found Reid alone in the bull-pen, and well before that too, but... "Technically, changing the cooling-off period from half an hour to fifteen minutes would tend to increase risk, so we should probably wait a week before..."

"Technically that would be rules-lawyering," Reid returns with no little smugness — "and, Hotch, you don't need to."

He's a little chagrinned at needing to be reminded, _again_ , that he doesn't need to go hunting for an excuse to say no: he can just say it. But he's also suspicious of the particular intensity with which Reid's reminding him. Then he sees the fork. "Seriously."

Reid manages simultaneously to smirk and wait with baited breath. Because sure, Hotch can drop the objection and go to Reid's apartment and be made to hit him even though some part of him isn't quite sure about it just now — except that, knowing he's unsure, the rules oblige him to call a halt. Reid is _making him_ say no.

And he's still hopeless at it. "Not tonight," he manages, and even though Reid nods easily he feels compelled to explain, "I think I need to get some things straight in my head first."

Reid gives him half the shuffled confetti to dispose of in a separate trash can. Or possibly to burn and wash down a drain, while they're engaging in forensic countermeasures. "It's probably mostly a matter of practice," he says.

And Hotch suspects he's going to be getting plenty of that.

*

There's one more part of the past he decides to finally confront before he goes home.

The storage unit is badly-lit, chilly, and smells faintly musty. His plan, for as long as he's been procrastinating on it, has been to get in, retrieve his bike from its perch on top of the boxes on top of the desk at the back, and get out, because the memories rise up like dust from everything in here.

Like the chest, squeezed under that desk, that Jack hid in: once in play, once in deadly earnest. Hotch sold off a lot of the furniture from the house, but some things just aren't for strangers.

In the late night quiet he traces its lid, remembering with a time-dulled but ever-present ache. But not remembering Haley's corpse, this time. Even the sense-memory of Foyet's bloodied flesh and shattered bone under his knuckles has been cathartised along with this evening's hand-scribbled papers in the office shredder.

So instead he remembers his relief, opening the chest to find Jack safe. He remembers how Foyet had wanted to destroy their family: to separate them, kill them one by one, and make Jack, by witnessing that horror, into his own mirror image. And he remembers how together that family — with their shared history; Hotch's desperate straw-clutching; Jack's solemn quickness; Haley's bravery not just stalling Foyet but, like a chessmaster, thinking years ahead where everyone else was focused on the next five minutes — together they defeated Foyet with resounding finality. Jack is not just alive today. No, Haley's triumph is far greater than that: instead, he's happy, well-adjusted, and loving.

Hotch will never not feel the guilt of arriving too late to save Haley, nor the deep injustice of her murder. But when she most needed him to listen to her about their son's future — he thinks maybe he hasn't failed her in that.

He leaves his copy of the rules in the desk drawer, in a sealed envelope marked with Reid's name in case of sudden death and executors rummaging through his belongings. Then he retrieves his bike and, on an impulse, a handful of Haley's comics. Jack's old enough now to read them without tearing the pages.

A sudden smile parts his lips at the memory of Foyet assuming it was Hotch who was the Captain America fan. When it came down to it, Foyet never understood anything about their family at all.

He locks up, and heads home, and sleeps without nightmares.


	23. Chapter 23

Reid's apartment is strewn with books again. Hotch lifts his eyebrows: "I distinctly remember you finishing that thesis."

"Yes, but while Emily was away I started a Russian course, and, um..." The book nearest Hotch is in a script of hooks and dots. He's not sure what it is, but it's definitely not Russian. "There's room on the couch f-for bastinado."

Hotch eyes him. "There is. But you know I don't want to do that."

"Sometimes you're more comfortable with things the second time, when you know I'm okay."

Which is true, but... As Reid waits, Hotch takes his hesitation and converts it into a careful, "No."

"Okay," Reid says, and starts unbuckling his belt instead as he adds curiously, "Why not?"

"I guess I had to focus on not injuring you so I couldn't... relax or whatever this..." He leaves that unfinished as Reid hands him the belt. _No implements_ isn't in their new rules. He remembers swinging it last time, and the crack it made: his pulse remembers too. He remembers sitting on his bed the next morning thinking he'd ruined everything, and that's not going to happen this time, but... He tosses it over the back of the sofa. "Not tonight," he says, and shoves Reid there too.

"You don't have to hedge," Reid complains as his hands make a flailing attempt to protect his fly.

"I'm not hedging, I'm saying not tonight. And I'm making a... strong counter-proposal of something _you_ might feel more comfortable with the second time."

"You don't want me _comfortable_ ," Reid says, which is a really good point, but not at all insurmountable. As Reid realises that himself, his eyes go wide and he breaks away. Hotch grabs after him, and there's a brief struggle which knocks a couple of books off a chair after all, but when Reid looks over his shoulder to check they're okay Hotch easily pulls him off-balance and drags him to the sofa seat.

He gets him half over his lap, half on the sofa. Pinning his arm behind his back cuts the struggling down in an instant; grasping both waistbands makes him squeal. "Hotch, I— No: just the pants."

So Hotch pulls down just the pants, but he pulls them right down to his knees, and before Reid has time to more than squeak in surprise he slaps him hard on the bare back of one thigh.

"Ow!" echoes the crack. The imprint of his hand is briefly white, before the blood rushes back. He slaps the other thigh next, and again for another squeak from Reid, and stays with it while his first handprint turns from pink to scarlet.

Reid breathes harder, trying to suppress his cries. Hotch's breath catches all the more at the little noises: at the quiet gulp that might be no more than his throat sticking. Smack by smack his hand paints the thigh an even red, until he can't hear the difference between Reid's gasps and his whimpers.

He holds to the wrist that spasms with the effort not to struggle. He smacks and smacks, and feels the muscles ready themselves to stop him. He doesn't _want_ to stop. So he takes the obvious evasive action, switching back to the first thigh. Reid manages to jerk and howl and sag all at once: the headrush is dizzying.

He smacks and smacks: the rhythm has him, and Reid is as far from stopping him now as he was close before. He could spank him raw over every inch of his body, moving on each time the moment before Reid makes him stop, and finally, when there's not a patch of white skin left, start again and listen to him—

"Stop," Reid says. Hotch lets go so abruptly Reid loses his balance and has to scramble — one-handed, because the arm Hotch pinned behind his back is flailing uselessly — to regain his feet. Faced away from Hotch while he pulls his pants back up and fumbles with his fly, he asks, "What do you want to drink?"

Hotch pictures a whiskey, and doesn't even want it, which is a fascinating feeling. He wonders how long it will last, and if he can replicate it next time a craving hits.

"Hotch? Do you want juice or milk?"

"Oh... um, milk. —Just cold," he adds.

"Do you want some ice too?"

He blinks. "In milk?"

Reid opens his mouth, then shuts it again, and heads to the kitchen without answering.

It puzzles Hotch enough that he starts thinking again, and follows Reid to accept one of the icepacks he's retrieving from the freezer.

As they get glasses and milk and juice, a prickle of memory slips into the general haze of contentment. He hesitates, watching Reid lean his hip against the bench. But the whole point of him staying after is to not let these questions fester. So he asks, "Just before I switched to the other side, were you about to tell me to stop?" It's... _almost_ the same as what he means: _Did I manipulate you into continuing longer than you wanted?_

"I was about to tell you to switch to the other side," Reid says.

 _See,_ he lectures his subconscious, _communication isn't that scary._ And then Reid takes on a speculative, plotting look that Hotch knows too well. He asks, only half-teasing, "Should I be nervous?"

"Mm," Reid says with a smirk curving the corners of his lips, "no, you shouldn't, really."

Because, he means, if Hotch doesn't like it, he can just say no. The feeling doesn't go away, though, and eventually he works out why: it's not nervousness after all, but more of a kind of patient anticipation.

*

 _Anticipation,_ he thinks again as the woman (Beth Clemmons, her card says) jogs laughing away from him. But less of the patience. If he weren't still winded from his own run he might run after her and... And he's not even sure what. What he really wants is for her to turn back and keep teasing him while he just... drinks in that smile and jittery confidence.

Instead he heads back to work kicking himself for panicking and all but beating her off with a stick. At least, despite himself, he did end up with her card (Beth Clemmons, art curator at a museum he's heard of but never quite made the time to visit). But...

But the _anticipation_ , patient or not, feels just too janglingly similar to that anticipation with Reid. It raises sudden doubts, or re-raises them: has this thing between them begun to cross the line beyond... Well, obviously it crossed beyond the collegial long ago, even if they've never even used each other's first name. And they've ruled out the sexual often enough, but there's a trust in what they're doing and... an intimacy that goes beyond any other adult relationship he's ever had but one.

The comparison leaves him equally unsure what to think about that or about this. So he goes into work, and he focuses on their next case.

*

An UnSub who's sublimated a lifelong bloodlust beneath a lacklustre boxing career; triggered to murder by his son's leukaemia relapse. His ex-wife, struggling to hold things together for their dying son since his father's clearly not helping. She reminds Hotch so sharply of Haley it must show on his face: he finds Reid watching him there in the hospital corridor, and has to tell him, "I'm fine."

Reid accepts that without comment. Even after Hotch has argued the UnSub out of his state of denial, and argued two doctors and the local police into letting him in with his ex to see their son one last time; after he watches that farewell and the boy's death and sheds more than one highly unprofessional tear in his corner; after he hands the UnSub over to the locals and escapes to a restroom to wash his face — Reid still only offers a neutral, "I tidied the linguistics books."

He shakes his head without thinking about it. (Reid accepts that too.) He doesn't want more violence tonight. He wants... to be distracted.

Is it fair to bring Beth anywhere near the hot mess he's made of his life? Granted she's the one inviting herself in — though technically all she's invited herself to is one bike ride. Then again, if all she wanted was a training partner couldn't she have just gone online and...

Well, no. For a woman to look for a training partner online would mean sifting through all sorts of offers from men assuming she wants more, or that they can have more whether she wants it or not. Far safer — whatever she wants — to pick out her own target and quietly watch him for a while to confirm he's more interested in the training than the company.

She _was_ flirting with him. That's undeniable. But she was also doing it in a way that protected herself, and that's reassuring. At least she's got defenses against _some_ kinds of hot mess.

And when he steals a moment alone and phones her, no sudden excuses suggest she's changed her mind. They agree to meet with their bikes in the morning, while Jack visits his grandfather.

(Dave assumes his qualms are all about moving on from Haley. Hotch doesn't try very hard to correct him even though, of all the people in his life, Dave is the most likely to... at least hear him out before reading him the riot act. Silence has never felt so much like a lie.)


	24. Chapter 24

His bike ride with Beth goes well. It goes really well. She talks a bit about her father, who died of MS recently; he talks a bit about Haley — not too much, but not hiding the fact that there's more to the story. It's a juggling act, and she's gracious about it and neither pries nor seems put off. They talk a bit about their jobs. But mostly they bike, she teases him, and he occasionally remembers to stop grinning long enough to tease her back.

They keep training together, and even catch a sandwich together one lunch. She talks about her mother, and movies she's seen with her friends. He sheepishly confesses the last movie he saw was Happy Feet 2, and talks about Jack and Jessica. And somehow he gets onto the subject of coins, and would be embarrassed about how nerdy he's sounding except apparently Beth is friends with someone who works at Dumbarton Oaks and knows all the good stories.

He doesn't tell her about Reid.

It's... complicated, after all. And anyway, it's presumptuous: he's not even dating her, just training with her. Granted he's increasingly thinking he _wants_ to date her, but even if that happens... Well, if that happens maybe he won't need to keep beating Reid up, and the whole question will be moot.

*

Prentiss's final psych eval reminds him a lot of how his own must have been, after Foyet. But she seems to be managing okay, in the field, and even he's got through, more or less. Still, he remembers Elle, and Gideon (though thinking of the latter and his refusal to help catch Foyet still makes him grit his teeth), so he makes her promise to talk to him if she needs to. He fully expects never to hear about it again.

Not even two days later she's sitting in front of him almost in tears from a case.

Most of what she says is in the silences and deflecting glances. It doesn't matter. And he can't find a much better response than listening noises, and really hopes that doesn't matter either.

"I didn't want him dead," she says, and it's clear at some point, deep undercover as a woman in love with Doyle, the lines between Emily Prentiss and Lauren Reynolds — between Doyle the terrorist and Ian the lover — ...blurred. The thought nauseates him, more than it should when he knows that she had a job to do and knows what that kind of job can do to people. He does his best to keep it off his face. It helps that she's not really watching it.

After another long silence she says, "Hotch, when I asked you if you wanted to talk about what happened with Foyet..." The question trails off before it's begun.

It's his turn to look away. He lied to her then; he can't now. The nausea reaches his throat, and it takes a long, slow breath to subside. "I remember," he admits.

"I'm sorry," she says: about what happened, or about asking, or maybe both.

He manages something like a shrug. It happened. Worse happened when Foyet came back for Haley. "I did want him dead," he admits too, in an attempt to bring this back to Prentiss. "It just didn't fix anything."

(He doesn't say: it gnaws at him sometimes, that Foyet died the same day as Haley, as if their deaths are somehow bound together. He doesn't say: he visited Foyet's grave once, hoping it might help the dreams to see that evidence of his destruction. He'd forgotten serial killers got fans. It had more flowers than Haley's.)

*

One day maybe he'll be able to shed a mood like this with a call to Beth, or a kiss, or...

Not yet. He visits Reid instead. And he doesn't tell him about Beth either.

Well, it just doesn't come up.

*

He trains with Beth for the last time before her race. He takes her on a date, and she kisses him, and the evening only gets better from there. He recognises this giddy euphoria too. From years ago, yes, with Haley; but also from after his visits to Reid.

Violence as a substitute for sex; sex as a substitute for violence.... They're not the same thing, he tells himself. He just can't figure out where that line _is_ , or how on earth he plans to straddle it without screwing up everything.

Not that he lets this stop him going on a second date, or cheering her along at her race.

Or, when Prentiss takes a bullet to the kevlar, meeting Reid's eyes on the way off the jet and thirty minutes later stepping into his apartment.

It's late, but he's not expecting this to take long. Neither of them are that upset really — Prentiss wasn't that hurt — it will just be easier to sleep with the edge taken off. But when he starts towards Reid, fist curling, Reid lifts a hand in the unmistakable, international signal to stop.

He stops, of course, and opens his mouth to ask—

Reid shakes his head and holds Hotch's eyes intently, as if willing him to understand. Well, he's not an idiot. He shuts his mouth obediently and waits for an explanation. Or, more realistically, for instructions.

They don't come. Reid lowers his hand, but he holds Hotch's gaze the whole time, making it clear this doesn't constitute permission to resume. When Hotch just keeps waiting, he looks smugly satisfied, as if he's just _demonstrated_ something.

And he has. He's demonstrated that Hotch will follow his non-verbal commands as readily as his verbal ones...

Hotch makes the realisation just in time — or Reid has waited to see the realisation in his eye — because now, adam's apple bobbing, Reid glances deliberately down at Hotch's... belt, he's going to assume. He deliberately makes himself _consider saying no_ — or shaking his head, he supposes — but finds he'd much rather find out how Reid plans to go about this. So instead he unbuckles the belt and draws it out of its loops, watching Reid's reaction.

The smugness continues, leavened with a trace of Reid-typical nervousness. When Hotch pauses, he nods, and Hotch folds the belt in half. It gets another gulp. Not another nod, though: no permission to rush him, and no turning of his own accord to give Hotch the angle—

Except the fingers of one hand are... almost flinching, as if in imagined pain. Hotch's hand tightens reflexively on the belt buckle: the imagined crack of it echoes as he steps forward. One confirmatory glance — Reid does flinch now, but makes no move to stop him, rather pulling his hand safely away from the thigh — and he swings the belt hard at his target.

The crack rives the midnight silence. Reid staggers, and half a whimper sounds in his throat. It's the first noise he's made tonight, and it's like music. And Hotch has no time to revel in it before his other hand flinches from his other thigh, demanding another blow there.

He swings, compensating for the backhand with more force: whistle, crack!, whimper. And Reid, flinching all the while, lifts his elbow higher — Hotch belts his ribs — and on the other side higher, as if protecting his head while leaving his ribs exposed.

He belts them — and at a movement in the elbow, again; and when Reid holds his cringe a moment longer than he'd expect, again. His eyes are fixed on Reid's face, and every twitch of finger or hip has to be evaluated too. It takes all his attention and focus, while the syncopated beat of belt and yelp sing in the background.

Reid stumbles; his chin lifts; Hotch grabs his collar. He sways a fraction, stomach muscles clenching against Hotch's, and Hotch yanks him that way, over the sofa so the air whooshes out of his lungs.

He's not obeying orders any more, he realises in the spaces between thought: he's meeting expectation. He's not reading signals, but body language. It floods his senses, and he soaks it up: rides the panic and pain, changes course only for _there_ and _harder_.

He belts again the line between ass and thighs; again Reid cries out. And twists as if clumsily to escape, though he has neither strength nor purchase for it; and Hotch hauls him up and throws him to the floor. He crumples, flailing to protect himself, but there's a gap, and Hotch kicks it.

He can do this — this is what he's good at — but there are limits, and Reid is pushing them, and if he misses just one cue to wait or stop—

He kicks (Reid all but wails) and kicks (Reid gasps for lack of air) and (Reid's palms go flat against the floor) stops. His knees buckle with the abruptness of it. He stumbles back to grasp the sofa for support, and when his arm proves no stronger simply slips to the floor.

He can't tell if Reid's laughing or just gasping for breath while grinning. He knows _he's_ grinning wider than he has in years.

Mind-reading, people say when they're mocking what the BAU does. But that's not mind-reading: this is. Reid's laughing, but not at anything. He's laughing in exhiliration, in triumph: he made Hotch start, he made him stop, he directed every moment in between, all without a single word.

Now Reid sprawls on his back on the bare floor as if he plans never to move again.

Hotch obediently drags himself up and fetches the milk and ice himself. Maybe it's less mind-reading and more mind control — and he's basically okay with this. It's a pleasantly floaty feeling, rather like being high on the drugs he most definitely never tried in his rebellious teen phase.

(And didn't try again, because it wasn't _pleasant floatiness_ that he wanted back then. It was a fight.)

He leaves Reid's milk by him, just far enough from his arm that he won't knock it when he manages to sit up again, and takes his own to the couch. He's thoroughly relaxed — he may or may not be half a-doze — when Reid says, "Did you know Rossi's making everyone come to your race?"

He suppresses a snort: trust Dave. "Let's just say I'm not surprised."

"You don't mind, do you?"

He nearly snorts again at the thought of telling Dave to back off. Then he thinks: well, he _could_. He'd need a solid excuse if he didn't want Dave to argue, but that's achievable (after all, Beth and Jack are going to meet, and isn't that enough for one day?) Even if it wasn't, he's a big boy. He can withstand a little arguing.

He just... doesn't want to. Dave's meddling and smirks may be as embarrassing sometimes as a mother's tweaking of her second-grader's collar. But he likes it. He likes Dave chivvying him into admitting things he's been trying to hide from himself, the same way he likes Reid pushing him to unleash the urges he spends the rest of his waking life suppressing. The same way (and so very different from the way) he likes it when Beth teases him.

There's something simultaneously disconcerting and liberating about this revelation that he's still trying to get his head around when Reid prompts uncertainly, "Hotch?"

The question, he reminds himself, and scrambles to cover for his silence. "Hmm? No, of course I don't mind," he says, and pushes himself to his feet.

"Did you fall asleep on my couch?" Reid asks gleefully.

"I was just... considering saying no," he says evasively, and takes advantage of the late hour to head home and leave Reid thinking he did.

*

He wakes on the morning of the triathlon feeling nauseous with nerves.

"Is it the race, or the whole 'girlfriend meets son' thing?" Dave asks shrewdly when Hotch lets him in at oh dark thirty to watch Jack.

Neither: not really. "I'm just going to focus on my time," he says staunchly, and escapes before Dave can prod any further.

His time on the swim is abysmal.

It's like he doesn't actually want to get to the finish line; doesn't want to be met by Dave and Jack, and Beth, and Reid with the rest of the team. Individually of course he wants them there. But together— He's always been uncomfortable with work and family colliding, and now _everything_ is about to collide.

Of course he's a bit nervous how Jack will react to Beth. So's she. But they've already agreed to keep it lowkey, and if it doesn't go well at first Hotch will talk with him and they'll try again another time. So it's not really that.

Really it's the thought of Beth meeting Reid. Of her noticing, with her outsider's perspective, that something between him and Hotch is off. Or of Reid recognising that the dynamic Hotch has with her is not that different from the dynamic he has with Reid; noting Hotch has purposely never mentioned her; and figuring where there's deception there's guilt. Or of Hotch himself letting something slip — some look, some awkwardness — just enough for the team to pick up on and watch more closely, and drag everything out into the harsh light of day....

He finds his bike and strips off his wetsuit. The cold air (what idiot decided to do a triathlon in _February_?) is a welcome shock, jolting him from his circling thoughts. Screw it all, he decides. Maybe when he gets to the end of this race Dave will take one look at him and incredulously ask, _Are you cheating on Beth with_ Reid _?_ Or maybe nothing will happen and they'll all go on as they always have. But one way or another, he's going to cross this finish line.


End file.
